Your Fundraising Website Design

A great fundraising website design is the first step to pleasing a visitor and turning them into a supporter.

From my experience and research, your site must have a design that is simple, clear, easy to understand, and impactful.

A complex, extravagant website will usually chase your visitors away.

One of the most successful charities in terms of Cause Marketing is "Charity: Water". They have a fantastic website that is - You guest it - simple but highly impactful. Take a look.

Another example of a simple Nonprofit website design is knit-a-square.com

How to design your organization and fundraising website. (Photo by James / Flickr)

Ready to start designing?...

Let's Start With Your Navigation:

The first thing to remember is that your visitors are coming to your site to find information about your cause; obviously, this info should be easily accessible.

Your navigation bar must be simple and easily understood.

Your footer is another place to add links for site navigation but make sure it doesn't become too congested… And the same goes for your Navigation bar. Remember, Simple and Clear all the way.

Fundraiser Site Logo:

Your Logo is an important part of the look and feel of your fundraising website. (It is the bar that sits across the top of your page.)

While including your organization's logo (if you have one); the site logo should clearly speak the purpose of your cause in as few words as possible.

Background:

Once again the same "keep it simple and clear" applies.

A simple white or grey background can be very effective!

Text Font And Color:

I'd suggest using a Sans Serif font, like Arial, Verdana or Helvetica instead of the popular "Times New Roman".

They are just simply more suitable for the scanning eye (which is how people read webpages… by scanning).

Your Font color must be black.

You can use other colors to emphasize things but don't use too many. Too many colors, or even too many ALL CAPS makes your webpage look amateurish.

And Always Remember…

If you are accepting donations on your site, make sure that your donation button can be easily found.

If a possible donor has to search around your site to try and find where to donate, they'll probably get irritated, lose interest and leave without donating.

And Now On To The MOST IMPORTANT PART Of Building And Designing Your Fundraising Website:

The topics and content of your fundraiser website.

A bad look and feel will more than likely chase away your visitors. But having a perfect look and feel doesn't guarantee that the visitor will turn into a supporter...

It's your content and what you write about that will convince the visitor that your cause is worthy of supporting.

So make sure you TELL your STORY in an emotionally connecting manner!

Write High Quality Content...

You need to write high quality, informative and emotive content that appeals to your visitors.

I say emotive because you're fundraising for a good cause right; so you need to draw your visitors in and make them connect emotionally with your story...

Make them feel involved, and that by helping, they will be doing a good thing! Which of course they will be.

Also Understand That...

Before you start writing your website pages you will need to keyword focus (without overdoing it) each of them according to their topic.

This plays an important part in receiving free traffic from the Search Engines.

Final Notes & Where To Next:

Okay! So now you have a really good idea of how to design your fundraising website... simple and clear.

And this isn't just my opinion, I can guarantee that most (If not, all) of the website design guru's will all recommend a simple, clear and informative website.

Are you getting excited yet? You should be...

You are well on your way to having your fundraising website up and running, and providing your cause with all types of fundraising possibilities!

Now let's get started with how to write your fundraising website to optimize for the Search Engines...

And after that we'll learn some super ways of marketing your website!