As part of my strategy to grow Indiez, I decided to move to DC. This gave me the opportunity to interact with a lot of local Nonprofits. I found that whether it was working with them as a service provider or a volunteer one thing remained the same, Nonprofits change the world. The way they achieve with limited financial resources was really inspiring to me. The stories I heard from these experiences really made me reassess my priorities in life.

I decided that I would find a cause that really meant a lot to me and that I could really get behind. I found this great charity that championed Child Rights. They were doing incredible work so I decided to log on to their website to make a donation. I was very surprised by the quality of the website and despite being determined, I couldn’t find a donate button. As someone who works with Startups, I used to seeing websites that talk to me, engage me and make me take action. I started looking at other Nonprofit websites and found this is widespread across the sector.

After analyzing over 100 Nonprofit websites, I found a number of areas that were consistently bad across the majority.

1. Most of the websites were focused on the about us page. This is fine for telling people about the cause but doesn’t engage users in an interesting conversation.
2. The largest donor group is composed of millennials (contributing over $48bn to causes annually). The old-fashioned website designs that were built in the 2000s don’t encourage this demographic to donate.
3. The majority of web traffic has now switched to mobile. Close to 80% of the websites I visited were not mobile friendly. You could see the content on mobile but it was hard to navigate. It is also worth remembering that 25% of payments are now made through mobile.
4. What these sites on built using also matters. The majority of sites were built on WordPress or even ASP.Net. This creates a loading time of close to a minute. In the days of lessening attention span, this can be a disaster. It leads to high bounce rates where donors leave after opening a single page.
5. I couldn’t find one example that utilized simple tools that could increase the conversion rate of donors visiting the website. There are a number of basic systems available such as chatbots or live chat systems that greatly increase conversions of donations on site.

The above are just a small host of the issues that I found in my research. They all require attention but I know if you work in a Nonprofit you are extremely busy, so I would ask you to do one thing. Open your website and test the donor flow of the website. How long does it take to donate? It takes less than a minute to purchase something on Amazon. On most Nonprofit sites it takes close to 10 minutes. Why? If you’re working at a non-profit then we humbly request you to consider reaching out to Indiez and we will be happy to give you a free audit of your current website. We are passionate about helping Nonprofits in their quest to change the world for the better.

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