Benefits of having your own website

Your website and email address form another shopfront, helpdesk, outlet, channel, advertisement and contact point, through which you make your information and services available 24 hours a day, seven days a week to the whole world.

The success of your website will ultimately depend on its design, presentation and how useable and informative it is.

Promotion, ongoing maintenance and the extent to which the organisation embraces it are also crucial to long term success. The website also relies on the imagination of staff for providing content and features that will entice users and make it easy for them.

Talk to your staff and volunteers first. A website should extend the reach of an organisation, which means its people. Ask your staff for ways to use the website to save effort or do more. Quiz them on what they spend their time doing. You might find, for example, that your receptionist handles hundreds of calls from school students. Could you divert these to the website and save staff time as well as postage sending out information? Or perhaps member retention is this year's objective. So what do your frontline staff say about why people don't renew, or otherwise leave the fold? How can you use the website and email alerts to address this? Once you've talked with staff you can think about using focus groups and surveys to talk direct with representatives of target audiences.

Better service to clients and members

An effective website can provide:

• easy access at any time to information and online services for members/clients anywhere in Australia (or even overseas)
• both general introductory information and, with a click through, a wealth of detail
• access to your services for people with a disability who may not have been able to obtain these services– when distributed by traditional means – e.g. advice and information through your office.

Increasingly audiences expect to be able to find basic information on the web. The expectations of online audiences will not diminish over time – they will only increase. This raises the bar in terms of delivery methods, content, structure and quality of online material.

To fail to be online or to fail to provide a website that is user-friendly, informative, and up-to-date is to risk alienating web-enabled clients, members and potential donors.

Email gets them in

Websites are mainly a passive repository of information and services. They are like shopfronts – you have to get people to turn up. Some retailers make sure they sell one or two essential daily items – newsagents selling the paper for example – then use the opportunity of that visit to interest people in other goods. Others have to advertise and promote.

While there are various ways to promote your website to the general public by ensuring a high search engine ranking, your site also needs to be well integrated with the way your organisation uses email. Email is one of the main ways of driving traffic to your website.

One of the best ways to drive this traffic is a well organised email newsletter (e-newsletter) sent to an email list. Send your members and supporters short bits and redirect to longer text on your site.

The key is to collect those email addresses now. Remember that more people use email regularly than search or browse the web.

Improving external and internal communication

A website facilitates a number of internal and external communication processes. Your website can:

• display documents such as directories or proposals
• make current information accessible to the public
• display employment opportunities
• include valuable resources in one area, i.e. related links
• provide numerous opportunities for two-way communication
• help you build communication and community among your members, clients and the general public.

An up-to-date website is also a great resource for your own staff especially if you don’t have a staff intranet as it can contain a lot of your organisation’s documents and procedures. But remember that your website is open to the whole world and you need to make sure that you don’t include any documents that are inappropriate on a public site, for privacy or other reasons.

Reducing costs

A well planned, implemented and maintained website can provide numerous cost savings for your organisation. It can also reduce the time staff spend performing administrative tasks, freeing them up to concentrate on the things that really matter – such as servicing your members and clients.

Use the checklist below to identify possible cost savings and efficiencies that effective use of email and a carefully planned website can offer your organisation:

Checklist

Providing information – reduce staff time on the telephone with members, clients and donors by referring them to the website – also some telephone enquirers will be better informed as a result of looking at the site and therefore will require less staff time.

Publishing/printing – reduce printing costs by making documents available on a website and then either reduce the numbers that are printed of brochures, reports, programs etc or possibly eliminate printed versions altogether.

Photocopying – reduce usage and need for more and/or larger photocopiers.

Faxing – reduce the cost and time of sending information by fax. Online forms can also reduce the cost and time involved in re-keying data and reduce errors in interpretation of poor quality originals, e.g. handwritten forms and poor quality faxes.

Postage and handling – reduce cost and time from sending out receipts, brochures etc. Savings here can be substantial.

Paper – reduce overall paper consumption and cost.

Processing time – streamline processing of forms, e.g. online membership applications and orders.

Online sales – if you get to the stage of selling services or products online (e-commerce) you will reduce the time and cost involved in processing of accounts, reconciliation and banking. The reduction of invoicing can improve cash-flow.

An added benefit in shifting the emphasis of the role of staff from processing data and undertaking routine administrative work, to providing quality of service is improved staff satisfaction.

The ‘cost’ of not having a credible website or using email effectively can be measured in terms of lost opportunities to cut costs and deliver better services.

Improving promotion

One of the great benefits of the web is that it can help broaden your membership/client/donor base at a relatively low cost. As more and more people get access to the internet and become confident web users, the potential to expand member/client/donor bases will increase proportionally.

A website can be a highly effective promotional tool. This is not to say that promoting your organisation on the web is better or more effective than traditional forms of promotion. It is simply another promotional tool that should complement these other forms.

A website provides unique promotional potential because:

• it is visible to members, clients, potential donors etc 24 hours a day, seven days a week
• it is visible wherever they are in the world
• it is able to reach a lot more people including more potential members than more traditional forms of promotion
• more information can be provided on a website than in a brochure
• by setting up simple registration procedures on your site you can extend your list of potential members, donors etc.

See Promoting your website.

Generating revenue

For nonprofit organisations that rely either wholly or partly on raising revenue from the public, your website can be a useful and very cost-effective tool for:

• collecting membership subscriptions
• generating income from the sale of services and products
• collecting donations.

The process of accepting payments through your website is known as e-commerce . E-commerce can replace or supplement your existing revenue collection processes.

Even if you are not in the position to use your website to develop online collection systems, you can provide downloadable subscription and order forms on your site and provide information about how people can make offline payments.