How To Optimize Your Nonprofit’s Website to Increase Engagement and Conversions, for Beginners (in Micro Lessons)

This Micro Course ‘How to Optimize Your Nonprofit’s Website to Increase Engagement and Conversions’ is focused on your most important online hub: your nonprofit’s website. It’ll help you better understand how to evaluate the performance of your website and the key data that you need to focus on to know which of your digital marketing efforts are working. 

It also provides easy, quick, and free optimizations that you can apply yourself. It’s specially designed for non-tech people: it’s all about demystifying web terminology and empowering you to improve your website. And improving your website will help to reach the right audience, and increase engagement with your cause.  

What you will learn during this Micro Lessons course

1. The difference that optimizing your website can make
2. How to check the current performance of your site using free tools
3. Google Analytics: what data to look for 
4. Tracking conversions (donations, sales, signups) on your website
5. How to set up handy reporting dashboards and automatic email reports with Analytics
6. Calls to action - why they matter, how you can add them to your site
7. How to create winning landing pages
8. How to improve your donation form and increase donations
9. How to craft web content that will increase engagement and conversions
10. Easy, free, and affordable optimizations that you can do yourself

Course Outline: 

This Micro Lesson includes 8 Units and 28 Lessons: 

• Unit 1: “The Case for Optimizing Your Website” 

Course Introduction

1. Your website is your online hub - why you need to optimize it
2. Make the case in your organization for time and budget to do this
3. Case studies - the difference optimization can make

• Unit 2: “How to Evaluate Your Website’s Performance”

1. Evaluating your website's performance
2. Run an SEO checkup
3. Run a site speed test
4. Review Analytics and make sure that conversion tracking is set up
5. Tracking on third party services

• Unit 3: “Google Analytics Demystified”

1. Don’t be intimidated by Analytics - the main things you need to understand
2. How to set up conversions
3. How to set up dashboards and email reports on Analytics
4. If you don’t have conversions - where to find the performance data

• Unit 4: “Calls to Action on Your Website”

1. Best practice for calls to action
2. Review your calls to action - are people clicking?
3. Your navigation bar

• Unit 5: “Creating Powerful Landing Pages”

1. Why landing pages are so powerful
2. How to create winning landing pages
3. Quick and easy options for creating landing pages
4. Improve your donation forms

• Unit 6: “Improving Your Web Content”

1. Best practice for web content
2. Check if people are reading your most important pages
3. How to improve the content on your key pages

• Unit 7: “The Power of Keywords”

1. Why keywords matter & how to do keyword research
2. Using your keywords
3. Meta descriptions

• Unit 8: “Getting It All Done: Actions to Take”

1. How to get your optimizations done
2. Security certificates - why they matter for search engines and for building trust
3. Wrap up - some useful resources for doing this work

You’ll Get These BONUS Materials: 

• The Micro Lessons Slides
• An action list of improvements to apply to your website
• A checklist for regular website performance checks
• Web style guide template - an editable document with guidelines on best practice for web content, that they can customize with their own organizational style rules
• Tutorials list - list of tutorials for key technical tasks (adding Google Analytics to website, etc)
• A template for an Analytics dashboard that will help you focus on the data that you need

About Your Instructor:

I’m Jean O’Brien, I’m a digital consultant and designer from Dublin, Ireland. I’ve specialized in working with nonprofits for 15 years, and have worked with a huge range of charities and causes. I’m also the founder of Digital Charity Lab, a social enterprise that builds digital skills in nonprofits and causes. My expertise on this topic is:

• I started out as a web designer, designing and coding entire websites from scratch, so I know how it all works under the hood.
• Working on cross-channel campaigns as a charity digital marketer have shown me how important it is that your website - your main online hub - is as effective as possible. Optimizing your website will bring about an uplift across multiple digital goals. 
• Cross-channel campaigns have also shown me how crucial it is to measure and compare different results from different channels, so you know what should be prioritized, and I’m passionate about sharing that knowledge. 
• For 15 years, I’ve been in the nonprofit sector, working with tight budgets and limited resources - so I have a lot of experience of doing quick and affordable optimizations (and of course the difference optimization can make to small organizations is so valuable!)