Sanky Blog

By Harry Lynch & Paul Habig

Are you worried about Wall Street’s woes? Fretting about your donors’ plunging portfolios? Wondering if your foundation funders can still make good on their pledges?

If you’re trying to figure out what sure-fire steps you can take to bolster your fundraising efforts in the coming weeks and months, have you considered … well … search engine optimization?

As one strategy for these times, it’s not nearly as off the wall as it sounds. Through all of the economic turbulence of the recent months, giving via the Internet has continued to be one of the brightest spots in fundraising and shows few signs of being affected by the crisis. But no matter how wonderful your website is (or you think it is), your best donors and potential donors can’t give to you online unless they find your website in the first place.

Search engines are the second biggest source of website traffic, second only to email (see the July 21 AFP eWire story on email appeals).

Search engine optimization (SEO) should be a key tool in your fundraising arsenal.

By now, most of us know the basics of SEO: Submitting our websites to major search engines, placing text on our homepages that’s rich with descriptive keywords and ensuring our website contains quality content that is frequently refreshed.

But the methodology used by Google and Yahoo is a constantly changing—a peculiar science with a fair bit of art thrown in. Keeping up with the latest trends in SEO can be difficult—and falling into traps and making common errors is hard to avoid. A few tips for these challenging times:

Site Architecture and Design. Technical minutia may put many fundraisers to sleep, but it is hugely significant when it comes to ensuring that your site is search-engine friendly. Utilizing up-to-date methods of coding and structuring your site is absolutely essential when it comes to SEO. If your website was designed more than three or four years back, chances are the technical structure is limiting how well the search engine “spiders” can find and read the information on your site.

Title Tags. Each web page on your site has a title tag, which is located in the “metadata” field. Adding strategic and relevant keywords or key phrases in this field is likely to gain you significant improvements in your search engine rankings. The text within the title tag is what appears in a search engine result.

Keyword Frequency. This is a fairly easy SEO technique. First, you need to decide what keyword or phrase is going to be optimized for a webpage (one or two per page). Second, make sure there is repetition of that keyword or phrase throughout that webpage. Last, add the same keyword or phrase in your website headings (text that is often larger and bolded, known to website designers as the <h17> tag). This will make a huge difference with SEO.

Friendly URLs. In the age of content management systems, pay attention not only to the SEO opportunities your system may provide, but to also some the roadblocks. For example, many content management systems (the program that allows you to build your website) generate URL web addresses that are comprised of numbers and lack a descriptive word or two that will make this key online component SEO-friendly.

Links. Have you considered methodically approaching websites that have related topics or content and asking them to provide a link to your own? What about submitting articles or press releases? These are all good ways to establish your site as an “authority” on issues, and this low-tech approach is highly effective but often overlooked. Incoming links from legitimate and apposite websites not only generate traffic, but tend to dramatically improve your rankings in Google and Yahoo.

Flash animations. Your beautiful animations may dazzle your boss and board members, but search engine spiders generally index only text that is in a particular computer code called HTML. The very elements causing those oohs and ahhs may also be limiting your traffic by making it difficult for crawlers to read your site. Consider imbedding flash “movies” into your HTML codes rather than designing your entire site in Flash.

Of course, it takes time for search engine rankings to improve. The steps above won’t provide you with instant gratification. But as you watch your website traffic gradually and steadily increase and your donations climb, the efforts will be well worth it—especially in these troubling times.

Gilda’s Club is named for comedian Gilda Radner, and was founded by Joanna Bull (along with Gene Wilder and Joel Siegel), who worked as a cancer psychotherapist during Ms. Radner’s illness. Gilda’s Club works to create welcoming communities of free support for everyone living with cancer - men, women, teens and children - along with their families and friends. Gilda’s Club believes that providing an emotional and social support community is an essential complement to medical treatment for people living with cancer.

SankyNet understands the importance of the work Gilda’s Club is doing for those learning to live with cancer. We look forward to working with Gilda’s Club during the coming months to redesign their website and expand their vital online resources. Thousands of people living with cancer have found Gilda’s Club to be a sanctuary during a very scary time. SankyNet is excited to find ways to craft their website to feel as warm and welcoming as Gilda’s Club itself.

Please take a moment to learn more about Gilda’s Club of New York.

When Greenwich House approached SankyNet with the opportunity to redesign their website, we were thrilled at the creative potential this project held.

For more than a century, Greenwich House has brought people together to overcome big-city isolation and the problems that go with it, making them feel at home in their communities. Operating 17 different social, medical, mental-health, educational and cultural programs, Greenwich House serves the needs of more than 9,000 New Yorkers annually.

In their original site, each of Greenwich House’s diverse programs stood alone with their own independent looks and feels. SankyNet recommended a dramatic site re-design to bring each Greenwich House program together under one cohesive design, allowing each program to remain distinct while still connecting to the overall theme. Now the children’s education program and the senior services program each reflect their own personalities while still fitting within the Greenwich House theme. The arts program and the health/social services program feel separate, yet still connected to the Greenwich House site.

After SankyNet’s redesign, the Greenwich House site looks great and is much more user-friendly!

Greenwich House was so pleased with our site redesign and branding work that they signed on with SankyNet for an ongoing marketing and communications plan. We are excited to continue this partnership with Greenwich House and look forward to working with them well into the future!

Please take a moment to look at their new website.

On Saturday September 13, after crossing Cuba and raging through the Gulf of Mexico, Hurricane Ike made landfall at Galveston, Texas. Both people and their pets were in dire need of assistance after this devastating storm. By Monday afternoon, SankyNet had quickly created and distributed an emergency e-appeal to help PetSmart Charities to raise the funds they would need to respond to this crisis. And respond they did.

PetSmart Charities® deployed its Emergency Relief Waggin’® to assist groups managing vital rescue operations on the front lines… providing 16 tons of emergency animal-care and volunteer supplies valued at $50,000. Supplies include pet food, crates, beds, bowls, litter and litter pans, and other necessary animal-care items, as well as a generator, fans, tents, a battery charger, lights and other supplies to assist the volunteers on site who are caring for displaced companion animals.

SankyNet is proud to have helped PetSmart Charities in their heroic effort. If you would like to learn more about our fundraising efforts for PetSmart Charities, please click here.

By Paul Habig

MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn… Should these sites be a part of nonprofits’ online fundraising strategies? How do nonprofits raise funds from social networks? Are they really raising money?

The Washington Post recently published an article about the total funds raised from Facebook’s Cause application, which allows Facebook users to fundraise for their favorite charity with the support of other users and friends.

Nearly 20,000 nonprofit organizations collectively raised a whopping $2.5 million in the application’s first year. Breaking this down, this averages $128.50 per organization. Don’t get me wrong, this is an exciting moment in online fundraising, but these numbers require us to put the medium in perspective.

So, should nonprofits be investing time, energy, and resources into social networks?

Yes… but as part of a long-term online strategic plan, not as a short-term online fundraising plan. Why? Social networks have become the latest communication medium for the next generation of future donors, a generation that generally doesn’t respond to direct mail and uses email less and less.

Why reach out to these constituents now? We know this demographic are many years away from entering the ideal age for online donors. Nonprofits, such as Amnesty International, canvassed college campuses in the 60s and 70s, creating their present-day donor base. Similarly, nonprofits with a large presence on social networks will be in an ideal position to mobilize a future generation.

The pillar of online fundraising is built on the foundation of long-term cultivation and stewardship.

In conclusion, demographics for social network sites are changing everyday as more people, young and old, flock to these sites. Fundraisers need to be utilizing the social networks as part of their online communications strategy. Additionally, campaigns need to be integrated with all mediums–including direct mail, email, websites, and social networks.

By Harry Lynch
Published on AFP site on April 14, 2008

Back in ancient times—say around 1998—we all knew that the Internet was going to take over the world. Remember that? How obsolete and uncool was everything else, including every other fundraising medium and method, about to become?

It wasn’t to be, of course. Not even close, in fact. Yet even the naysayers, who have a decade’s worth of history and hindsight on their side, would do well to stop and take note of just how far we have come in just 10 short years.

The approximately 50-fold increase in the amount of money being raised online over the last decade is eye-popping. While the Internet may still represent less than 4 percent of the nearly $300 billion being donated annually in the United States, if the rates of growth hold up, well, you do the math.

Of course, there’s also the often-overlooked fact of who is now online. Fully one-third of people over 65 (READ: those most philanthropically inclined) are now active on the Internet. Plus, nearly three-quarters of those in the 50–64 age group (i.e. the folks making the most money) are going online regularly. That degree of Internet penetration among older adults is wildly ahead of what was projected just a few years ago.

There’s just no doubt about it: The future of online fundraising is clearly very bright—and very, very complicated.

Rapid shifts in what people do online and how they do it, as well as the growing tendency for older users to jump back and forth between new and traditional media, make best practices for online fundraising a rapidly moving target.

When it comes to new media, there’s simply no such thing as timeless lessons. The best anyone can claim to do is offer a few observations that might serve as guideposts in these extraordinary—and extraordinarily challenging—times. Here are a few:

• Keep up with, and invest in if you can, the newest thing. Pay close attention to trends and shifts. However, don’t bet the house—at least not yet—on social networking or text messaging campaigns. These are vital and exciting ways to engage mostly younger audiences. There are a few important exceptions, but the majority of nonprofit organizations have yet to raise truly significant funds through these channels.
• Pay more than lip service to synchronizing online and offline fundraising and communication channels. “Integration” should be more than just a buzzword. More and more online donors—and in all likelihood your most important ones—are likely to move offline at some point and mail you a check, or vice versa. Keep track of them and engage them in the right way, in the best medium, at the right time.
• Listen (of course!) when the 40-year-old chair of your board tells you to post a video to your website or insists that you add some Flash animation. At the same time, don’t have the entire strength of your online appeal depend on any feature that might be a barrier for anyone who might have a slow Internet connection or an older computer, or who simply may be less comfortable with downloads and new software. (Fact: 53 percent of Americans used dialup Internet at home in 2007!)
• Don’t skip the basics: building a great website, getting people to your great website and using email to engage and ultimately solicit your constituency. The vast majority of donations online are still generated by websites that make a compelling case, in both words and photographs, and succeed in getting people to visit them. (Another fact: a recent survey found that 62 percent of Americans visit an organization’s website before donating!)
• Don’t pay too much attention to how America’s kids communicate. While our text-message-happy youngsters may tell us that email is not cool (“so my parents” was the last quote I heard), that’s exactly the point. Email is now the preferred means of communication by many parents, along with aunts, uncles and grandparents. The last time I checked, those are still the very people who give money to nonprofit organizations.

Perhaps the next generation of donors will want to send their donations via text message, be motivated by clips on Google’s YouTube channels or respond to some unimagined method that we’ll be talking about in future articles.

We need to be ready. We need to keep our eyes open and be sure not to blink. The future is flying at us a whole lot faster than it used to.

We also need to be excruciatingly careful not to take our eyes off what we do know in the present: who gives online, why they give and what we know we can do today to raise more money online.