Leveraging Web Design and Analytics to Drive Nonprofit Success | David Pisarek

Ann Kraus: Hello, and welcome to Simpli.fi TV. I'm Ann Kraus. Our guest today is David Pisarek. David is Founder and CEO of Wow Digital, a company that designs and creates brands, websites, intranets, interactive kiosks, and even games for nonprofits and community-based organizations in Canada. David has over 20 years of experience working with nonprofits and does so by breaking apart processes and tearing down department silos. This allows him to use his background to effectively bridge the gaps between IT, marketing, communications, and fundraising. This later helps him align processes, streamline those operations, and ultimately help his clients achieve digital success. He's also the host of the podcast Nonprofit Digital Success. David, welcome to Simpli.fi TV. David Pisarek: Thanks so much for having me. Hi, everybody. Ann Kraus: Let's get started with the web design aspect of your role. Why should organizations think of their website as an employee? David Pisarek: That's an excellent question. Really, the end of the day, the purpose of your website is to help you market yourself. Your website is there 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 12 months a year, 365 or 66 days if it's a leap year, a year. It's there, it's getting people to know what you're doing, the impact that you have, and getting them to really understand why you exist. Why do you exist? The other side of it is it helps get people involved in your organization, whether it's volunteering or even making a donation. So, it's really crucial that your website is there to help your constituents. Ann Kraus: I think of it as it's your handshake. You just know the person right away. You meet somebody and you shake your hand, and the website is that handshake with the end user. David Pisarek: Yeah, and it's really about getting them comfortable about what you do. A lot of organizations, they're looking at their website all the time. The community isn't looking at your site all the time. They're going into Google, they're searching for something, they land on your site. We need them to take some kind of action when they're there, whatever that action happens to be, whatever's appropriate for the page they're landing on, and you need them to actually take the next step. The best thing you could possibly do is have some kind of email marketing list of some kind, gather their information, and then you can push out to them. Not every message you send should be, "Hey, donate." Nobody wants to be hit up over and over and over, "Donate, donate, donate." This happens to me all the time and really I can't stand it. Talk to me about the impact that your organization is having. The $5, the $5,000, the $50, whatever the donation is, how is it helping? Ann Kraus: What does a nonprofit organization website redesign? What does that process look like? What are the stages? Is it drastically different than a for-profit website? David Pisarek: You would think it would be different, but really it's not. The difference really is, what are the calls to action? In a for-profit site, to buy something or download a brochure of something, those are typically the call to actions. On a nonprofit site, it's drastically different. It's get involved. It's sponsor. It's learn more about this program or service, or sign up for a program or service, whatever that happens to be. The steps of a nonprofit redesign really are very similar to the for-profit site. You have multiple layers to a redesign. There's the design itself. There's the content on the website. There's the user interface and how are they interacting, and then you have the information architecture. So, what content is on what page of the website as you go through it. Those are the major categories. Our process at Wow Digital is we start with a kickoff call. We plan out the entire process with a plan of action at that initial call, and really we start looking at the navigation of the website. That's our process. So, build out a proper site map for you. Then, we take a look at the existing content that you have and we work through with our clients on what is it that they want to keep? What should they keep? So, let's dig into analytics and see what pages. Maybe, they're six, seven-year-old pages, but they still get 10, 15% of your traffic. Those would be critical to keep. I was actually just talking with a client earlier today about that exact same thing. Then, we get into mockups and designs. So, we take a look at information architecture, what should be prominent on the homepage or a program and service page or a contact page or any of those pieces? We do mockups for those, and then we go into development. We actually build it out and we test. We also test on the mockup stage. We do heat mapping and user testing on those, make sure that they resonate. Once the development is done, we do further testing to make sure that the clients are happy with it. We do user testing as well with it. We do accessibility testing. We want to make sure that the site can be seen and accessed by as many people as possible, and then we go into our launch phase. We have a 132-point pre-launch inspection checklist that we go through and make sure everything is exactly how it needs to be, and then we launch it. Ann Kraus: 132-point inspection, it sounds like something that would be done to a vehicle. David Pisarek: That's where we came up with the idea for that, but there's a lot of pieces that we need to understand. We need to know that the site is, for example, open and accessible for Google to come and index it, so that it knows all the content that you have on your site. We want to make sure that you have a little favicon icon, that's what it's called, so when you make a bookmark that it has a specific little logo that's attached there or a graphic or a letter or whatever it happens to be. So, we look at a wide range of things across there to make sure that your site's working appropriately. Ann Kraus: Mentioning Google and you mentioned analytics. So, I'm going to ask you about that. Many companies are using Google Analytics for their website analytics, as I'm sure you know, and with the change of UA3 to GA4, how are nonprofits working with this and how should they be prepared to effectively use it to increase their donations? David Pisarek: The key with the analytics is to know where people are coming into your website, what content is resonating with them, so that you can then produce more similar like content. If you've published a blog or a news article or something like that on your website and it's getting some decent pickup and traffic, create more similar content. That's what's going to resonate, that's what's going to drive more traffic, get you more visitors. Ultimately, the goal is to build your email marketing list or get donations. That's really what drives a lot of nonprofits. They need money coming in. It takes money to make money. That's very true for nonprofits as well, and that's really the point of this. The analytics, if you haven't already switched from UA3, so Universal Analytics 3, to GA4, Google Analytics 4, you need to do that right now. It stopped collecting data. UA3 stopped collecting data starting July 1st. So, a few weeks ago. If you have no data, it's really hard to make any kind of decisions that need data. What content is good? What content isn't good? What parts of your site are working? What parts are not working? You can do AB testing, for example, with call to actions on pages, and the analytics will really give you the data. Ann Kraus: Many companies, which I'm sure is nonprofit as well, use SEM and SEO, search engine optimization. Are there benefits of using that particular thing for nonprofits? Are there any clues that you have for big wins? David Pisarek: Absolutely. There's some key takeaways that you need to know in terms of leveraging Google. Google is the big search engine out there. Between your search engine that are driving traffic to your site, it's probably pulling in, I would say, 95% of your traffic from searches from Google over Bing or Yahoo. So, let's just concentrate on Google. Google has been very tightlipped and I think they are going to continue to remain very quiet about what is in their algorithm versus what isn't. I think that's something really interesting to pay attention to is it's really up to you to look at your analytics or have a consultant look at your analytics and go, "This is working, this isn't working," and really understand what you need to do more of or what you need to do less of. But in terms of quick wins, you want to have the brain and the thought of going, "What are the people that we want to connect with, what are they going to Google and searching for? How do we want to be found? What are those keywords?" You want to make sure those keywords are in your page title of your homepage at minimum. If you can create other content around those keywords, that will definitely help as well. If you're a local organization that works just with people in a specific county of your state or your province or city or village or whatever you want to call, you want to leverage something called local SEO. You want to also use the city or the village, the name of where you are, in the page title as well. It'll help you be found more. Ann Kraus: Okay, good tip, just dropping those names into those various areas. If I am a nonprofit, I work for an NPO and I'm listening right now, I'm a marketer, how would I know that it's time for me to redesign my website? David Pisarek: Awesome question. We did an audit of over 400 nonprofit and charity websites, and there were some really key problems with so many of them. Is your phone number able to be found easily and quickly? That's the key one. Does your website work properly on a mobile device? Take your phone, open it up, see how it works. If your website isn't mobile friendly... Let me take a step back for a second. Moments ago, I just said that Google doesn't talk about their algorithm. They have said that if your website isn't mobile friendly, it's not going to rank as high. So, you want to make sure that your website interacts properly on a mobile device. There isn't a sideways scroll. People don't scroll sideways on mobile. They scroll up and down. So, make sure that your site works really well that way. Take a look at the overall design. How does it make you feel? Does it look like it's on point and trendy? Take a look at the colors that you're using for accessibility. There are people who are blind that use the internet. Close your eyes, imagine what that could possibly be like. We need your website to be accessible, otherwise you're not properly serving your community. What does that mean? It means that images have proper alt tags on them, so that screen reader software will read out what the image actually is. It means that there's enough color contrast. This is usually the biggest problem. You need to have a four and a half to one color contrast ratio. What does that mean? If you have white text on a yellow background, it's impossible to read. Impossible might be too hard of a word, but it's really hard to read. Light gray on a medium gray, hard to read. Red on gray is hard to read. There are testing software platforms out there. You can put in your hex values or your RGB values, and it'll tell you whether or not there's enough contrast. It could just be some minor tweaks like that, just adjusting some colors. Ann Kraus: Do you have a podcast or a book or something that's been instrumental in your success or in your career? David Pisarek: There's one book, I've got it right here actually on my desk. It's called Hooked On You by Ian Harris. Really small book. It was super cheap, I think it was $5. It's about creating storytelling and leveraging that to help inspire and get people to take some kind of action or pay attention. Ann Kraus: Awesome. I know that you have your own podcast as well, so you probably get a lot of insight from all of the different guests that you have. What are some of the ways that people can get to learn more about you and your company or anything? Is it your website? Would it be your LinkedIn? Can you just give me one resource on that? David Pisarek: Absolutely. Head over to wowdigital.com. That's our corporate website. We have a blog and a podcast. Those are both on there. So, you can hear and read about everything. We have full transcripts of all the podcasts. We're also on your favorite player, if you're interested on that. That would be the best place. Ann Kraus: That's great, thank you so much. David, thank you so much for being a guest on Simpli.fi TV. David Pisarek: My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me in. Ann Kraus: Thank you all for watching. Simpli.fi TV is sponsored by Simpli.fi, helping you to maximize relevance and multiply results with our industry-leading media buying and workflow solutions. For more information, visit Simply.fi. That's S-I-M-P-L-I.F-I. Thanks for joining us today. I'm Ann Kraus, and I will see you next time.