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Website Stickiness Ok, now you have the nicest website and you are actively marketing it and getting new visitors everyday! Your website is clear and your cause is important and you are converting visitors to supporters. Now what? Now your goal is to form a connection with the supporters and get them to visit your site often. This is what is called site stickiness. There should be something at your site that lures the visitors back again and again. The more they visit, the more they remember the importance of your cause, and the more they will be happy to help your fundraising efforts! Ideas for making your site "sticky": Offer a newsletter: One of the best ways to keep your ideas and cause and website fresh in people's minds is offering a newsletter. Your supporter should have the option to get a newsletter from you once a month with great information about your cause. In your newsletter you can keep them informed as to what is going on with the politics of your cause. The auto responder/newsletter provider that I use happily is http://www.aweber.com Calendar: This works great for a community based website. Offer a calendar of local events that are happening in your community. If people know about the calendar, they will visit your site when they need information. Check out this web based calendar service: SmartCal - The Free Online Calendar and Event Service Greeting Cards: A great idea for any website is to offer custom e-greeting cards. If you are a school, it would be cool idea to convert really good pics of the kids into greeting cards. Advertise to the families that they can send a greeting card of their child for free over the internet. The greeting card software or service that you use should allow you to have a link back to your site. That would be a good way of both getting new visitors and offering a service that supporters might come back for. Another idea is to get the students to design their own greeting cards. The students will want their parents to send their artistic cards to all their friends and relatives. Thus, the parent will be encouraged to visit the site to send the greeting cards. In the process, the parent might notice on the school site that little Jimmy's first grade is in need of a $100 picnic table and the parent might right there and then click the link and donate the $100! Other sites can offer beautiful cards of animals or nature or whatever would suit your cause. If you have artists amongst your supporters see if they might agree to donate some of their artwork or poetry. www.4charity.com offers a software that enables the visitor to send a donation to your organization together with a greeting card. I can see this as a cool way of sending a birthday or holiday gift to that someone who has everything; a greeting card with a donation to a worthy cause in the recipients name. For free greeting card software, try www.bravenet.com . The problem with the free companies is that the cards themselves will have ads. To find other software, do a search on www.google.com for "greeting card software". Other ideas to make your site sticky:
Brainstorm! The key is to be creative. Try to think about the needs of your supporter community. What kind of service will be helpful to them? What would make them say "wow, that is cool" and make them recommend your site to others. Are many of your supporters vegetarian? If so offer a great vegetarian recipe a week, or have a monthly recipe contest. Are your supporters families with kids? Then think about fun kid activities or how about weekly reviews of the best kid sites on the net. I know, that I'm always in the lookout for good, solid, educational sites for my boys and may frequent a site that has weekly intelligent reviews of kid sites. Additional Recourses FindSticky.com - Find free content to make your website sticky! |
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