Social Impact Website MUST-HAVES to Drive Action and Revenue

This article is the third in a series. Catch up with the first and second ones Don’t Build Your Brand on Rented Land and Top 10 Mistakes Social Impact Websites Make if you missed them.

Your website has the power to convert passive visitors into engaged supporters. To inform the world about the problem you’re working to solve. To build and nurture a powerful community and a movement that creates real-world change.

To do that, you have to do more than just avoid common mistakes if you want to turn your website into a conversion machine for your mission. You’ll need a mix of strategy and creativity to build a truly modern digital experience, tuned to the expectations of our culture and your audiences.

This is only possible if your website is designed and built in the right way, with the right elements in place, and supported by the right activation strategy.

Three Foundational Engagement Pillars

To get started, let’s look at three foundational things your website must do really well before you start worrying about optimizing it for conversion. 

1. Clearly Define the Problem

You can’t assume that people visiting your website are aware of your issue area or the problem you are working to solve. Your high-level messaging should name and frame the problem, and do it in a way that is tangible, clear, and relatable to people outside of your space. 

2. Explain How Your Work Solves That Problem

You also can’t assume people understand how you’re solving this problem. Educate your community about how your unique approach and organizational strengths have led to meaningful progress in your mission. 

3. Activate Your Visitors to Help Drive Positive Change

You need to inspire and activate site visitors to get involved, take action, and join your community. A donate button in the top navigation bar isn’t enough. Look for creative, specific, and timely ways to invite your audience to take action, making sure to provide options to meet your visitors where they are. 

A first-time visitor should be able to understand these three key points in 30 seconds or less by casually browsing your website’s homepage. And that’s a generous benchmark. Make sure you’re nailing these at the least, if you want to engage people and get them into your conversion flows.

Deeper Strategies for Building on Your Foundation

Although the 3 key elements above are fundamental, they aren’t enough on their own to reach the true potential of your website and turn it into a flywheel of action and revenue generation. 

For that, you’ll need to consider some additional strategies.

1. Build Credibility for Your Brand

Even if you’re a big-name brand in the social impact space, you have to continuously build credibility for your cause and your organization. 

They’re looking for social proof, stories of impact, and external validation that you’re a reputable organization worth supporting. At its core, creating credibility is brand building.

2. Human-Centered Impact Storytelling

Building on point 1, you’ve got to capture more than just the minds of your community. You need to capture their hearts as well. You need to make your visitors feel something.

And you have to create an emotional connection to your cause and organization in an authentic and ethical way. Look for creative ways to tell human-centered, personal, relatable stories about your work. Ones that help visitors understand the human experience and impact — even and especially — if your work is 2 or 3 steps removed from these personal stories. 

3. A Frictionless Donation or Checkout Experience

The checkout experience itself won’t drive conversions, but if there’s friction in this process it absolutely will hurt your conversions. This one is a no-brainer. 

A few basics: Mobile-first, accept multiple checkout methods, keep your forms short and sweet, and encourage recurring giving vs. one-time donations. Here’s a quick test. Could a first time user donate or buy from your website on their phone while walking and talking with their friends in under a minute? No? Try again. 

4. A Media Hub

On the web, content is king. And although a lot of your content may already be distributed to other channels, your digital hub should be a dynamic media hub as well. 

Articles, stories, videos, podcasts, resources, and all other forms of content that you produce should be easily accessible and formatted for the best user experience possible. Your digital hub is the one place on the internet that you own and control. Be sure you’re using this living asset to its fullest. 

5.  An Action Center

When people want to get involved, you want to give them easy onramps to take action. And having a dedicated section of your site, an action center, is a perfect way to make that easy. 

Beyond standard actions like donating, buying, and volunteering, show your community that you can meet them wherever they are.

Spreading the word, sharing a piece of media, writing to their representatives, joining your private community or mailing list, are all zero-cost opportunities you can offer to new visitors. 

How can you activate your community to help build momentum and support for your organization? Keep in mind, this might look different online than it does in the real world, and requires fresh and creative strategies. 

6. Your Organization’s Origin Story

There’s a reason we put this one last. Although it’s important, we see so many websites focus 90% of their efforts telling their cause story but missing the mark on many of the other important elements of their site. But it’s still important to get this part right. 

Visitors do want to understand who is behind this work, how the organization got started, past wins and struggles, and the broader history of the organization. Just don’t lead with this and make it the main focus of your site. Focus on your solutions and the desired future state you want them to help you create.

Take Your Digital Content & Culture to the Next Level

Leveling-up your digital content and culture is challenging to do well and requires bigger investments. Don’t feel like you have to get to those below before the foundational elements we covered earlier are working well for you.

Once your digital foundation is in place, build out these other pillars to place your organization apart for others in your cause area.

1.  Create Interactive Experiences

Can you take key elements of your impact story and build them out as interactive experiences rather than standard media and content? Go beyond your standard digital annual report here.  Think New York Times interactives or Spotify’s Year in Review.

These experiences, when built and marketed intentionally, have the potential to go viral, nurture engagement, and help your brand and mission stand out. Think of them like features in a magazine, and aim to do one or more of these per year. And if you can use donor and customer data to personalize these, they can be extremely powerful for helping your supporters feel like they made a real difference. 

Example: 

We helped one of our clients, Equality Fund, build out an interactive experience where you could browse through a digital deck of playing cards that had positive feminist intentions paired with feminist artwork sourced from their community. Once you find your favorite card, you can share it with your friends with a single click or tap. That was a fun project to be part of.

2.  Produce a Brand Narrative Video

Video is a powerful storytelling medium. And you should already be including short form, lower production value video in your ongoing content strategy. 

But a higher-production value brand narrative video is a priceless asset that can serve you for years. This is one that’s worth investing in and featuring right on your homepage. It should hit the same three key elements your website does: Your problem, solution, and how viewers can get involved. The format of video is uniquely positioned to elicit emotional responses from your audiences and should be focused on deeper impact storytelling. 

Here are a few examples of great brand narrative videos to help get you started.

Scott Harrison, the Founder of charity: water, tells the story about how he launched one of the most iconic and effective social impact organizations in the world.

The Girls Who Code brand story as told through a hard-working rural family aiming to create a better future for their daughter.

The Outrider Foundation highlights their work through the story of Tina Cordova who tells the story of growing up just 45 miles from “Trinity” the test site of America’s first nuclear bombs.

3.  Build a Community Hub

Can you use your website as infrastructure for community-building? A community-first mindset is the future of social impact. Your digital hub is an opportunity to create virtual spaces for relationship-building, activation, and social engagement. 

You’ll likely build your online community on a third-party platform, but your owned website can also promote that community, showcase the benefits of joining, and integrate with this platform to provide member-only content and personalized experiences. 

Make your community feel like they’re part of something special and getting member-only benefits and opportunities.

Plan Ahead for Success

As you transform your organization into having a digital-first culture, you can build capacity and add the elements above. You can add them one at a time. If you add one every four months, you will have all three by the end of a year. A great goal.

No need to rush into these. You don’t have to do everything at once. Integrate these elements into your editorial calendar for the year so you can plan and execute them at a reasonable pace. And don’t forget to promote the heck out of them once they go live.

Experiment. Iterate. Engage.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by these tips, don’t feel like you have to do everything we just covered. Your website should be approached with the mindset of a gardener. Constantly moving between cycles of planning, building, nurturing, growing, and pruning. You don’t need to go from 0 to 100 — and you shouldn’t try to. 

Start with the 3 foundational points: Clearly define the problem, explain how your work is solving that problem, and activate your visitors to help drive positive change. Then begin to weave in some of the more advanced elements and strategies over time. 

Most importantly, remember that your website is not a one-off project that you set and forget. It’s digital infrastructure that needs to be used and updated consistently by your team to serve your community.

As you iterate on your website, be sure to include cycles of listening and feedback from your community. Are there points of friction, confusion, or missed opportunities to explore? What resonates and activates your supporters? What content and sections of the site seem to get the best engagement? Adopt a mindset of curiosity and experimentation, and a balance of letting strategies play out but also being willing to let go of things that aren’t working as well as you’d hoped. 

Your website by itself will not drive action or help grow your revenue magically. It requires activation through consistent content creation & campaigns, iteration, and attention from your team.

But when your website is set up with the right strategies and elements, it has the potential to scale engagement, build movements, and grow revenue to entirely new levels. 

Your Time is Now

Our modern digital culture is an ever-changing, complex ecosystem. Digital platforms, content, and experiences shape our real world actions, beliefs, and even view of reality, more than ever before. Today, our initial joy and wonder of a hyper-connected, global society sometimes feels like a naive dream from an innocent past.

But our digital culture has also led to tangible progress for society. Information and communication are now democratized. Community is no longer constrained by geographical reach. Social movements ignite and spread more rapidly than ever before. 

You can use the power of our digital channels to expand your reach, start important conversations about your social mission, and convert attention into meaningful action and real-world progress. 

As you build out your digital strategy for your organization, make sure you give your website the proper thought and attention it deserves. You can take the power back from the unstable social channels that hijack our attention and build deeper relationships with your community on your own terms. 

You can use the strategies and learnings that we outlined to turn your website into a powerful digital flywheel that builds momentum for your cause and grows support and revenue for your organization. 

We’re on the cusp of the next big shift in digital culture. Join us in making sure the next wave of the internet becomes its best chapter yet.