Friday, Jun. 8 I had the pleasure of attending AFP’s Fundraising Day in NYC.  Some takeaways – especially interesting points are in italics:

Session – Demystifying Fundraising Website Redesign

• who are your visitors?  what are they looking for?
• how will project be shared between departments? make sure to involve development
• do you need board support?
• how will you accommodate mobile website visitors?
• what CMS will you use?  (to facilitate content updates by non-technical staff)

• Get at least 3 proposals to your RFP.
• Ask who you will be working with during the redesign and have them included in the vendor’s presentation.
• Has vendor taken time to research your organization’s current website and mission?
• Does vendor have resources and availability to meet your time requirements?

• Allow for at least six months after you decide on a vendor
• Make sure you build a site architecture
• Send out wireframes first in black and white so stakeholders don’t only focus on color choices
• Consider SEO (search engine optimization) in mind when creating content and make sure keywords are in content, links, headers etc. – NOT just in metadata
• Beware of ‘feature creep’

Session – Rapid Fire Tips and Trends on Web, Tech and Social Media

• Target Facebook Ads to those who already ‘like’ your Facebook page
• Coordinate your campaigns across channels and ‘tell them what you told them’ in another channel, e.g. referencing a direct mail in an email follow-up
• Don’t assume that emails will be viewed with images - most email packages have a default of ‘off’ so you must have a message that can be understood w/o images
• Post public thank you messages to recognize donors and to encourage online giving
• Relate your campaign to current news / events whenever possible
• Offer a choice for reduced email frequency in place of full opt out
• Consider email trigger campaigns based on donor behavior, e.g. send an appeal shortly before someone usually gives