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July 5, 2023

Maximize Your Nonprofit's Impact Online with Sami Bedell-Mulhern

Maximize Your Nonprofit's Impact Online with Sami Bedell-Mulhern

How important is a website for a nonprofit organization?  What information should be on the site and how often should it be updated?  What impact can a website have on raising funds for the organization.

These questions and more are discussed as Nathan sits down with Sami Bedell-Mulhern, the heart and soul behind First Click. Sami's unique approach to digital marketing has reshaped how small and medium-sized nonprofits navigate the digital sphere

This episode is a deep dive into the dynamics of nonprofit websites and their vital role in mirroring an organization's goals to build trust with visitors. We explore the necessity of constant evolution, practical ways to keep the content relevant and fresh, and the importance of treating donors as valued customers. We also discuss the balance between zeroing in on an organization's main mission while avoiding the pitfall of overwhelming the website with too much information.

Sami Bedell-Mulhern founded The First Click to support nonprofits in the online fundraising journey. She helps organizations get more visitors to their website, turn them into donors and retain them. Sami started her journey in the nonprofit space back in 2006 and has held every job from founder to development to event planning and everything in between. In 2017, she started her own company so she could support more organizations in growing their impact.

You can find out more about Sami and The First Click here.



The Hosts of The Practice of NonProfit Leadership:

Tim Barnes serves as the Executive Vice President of International Association for Refugees (IAFR) and can be contacted at tim@iafr.org.

Nathan Ruby serves as the Executive Director of Friends of the Children of Haiti (FOTCOH) and can be contacted at nruby@fotcoh.org.

All opinions and views expressed by the hosts are their own and do not necessarily represent those of their respective organizations.

Transcript
Nathan Ruby:

Welcome to episode 94 of the practice of nonprofit leadership. I am Nathan Ruby. Well, today I am sitting at the control panel of the practice of nonprofit leadership and I got to tell you it's a lot of responsibility. If you've listened to more than a few episodes of this podcast, you know that Tim is the responsible one, and every time I have to run an episode by myself. Well, you just never know what's going to happen, good or bad. Well, thankfully, tim will be back with us next week and things will be back to normal. But today we are going to be talking about websites, and I have a love hate relationship with websites. I mean, you got to have one right. And today, if you don't have one, i'm not really sure you're actually in business, and you know, it's been that way for decades. And I always look at my websites and my own organizations and one of two things happen. One, i look at it and I say that's terrible, we need a new website. And then I find out the price of a new website And, after I get done choking, i decide that it'll have to stay as it is. Or two, i look at it and say that's terrible, we need a new website. And I actually end up spending the budget money to do it. Then I come back six months later I look at it and I say that's terrible And it starts all over again. So to help us make sense of all things websites we have Sammy Bidel Mulhorn. Today, sammy is the founder and owner of First Click. First Click is a digital marketing company whose purpose is supporting you and finding ease in your digital marketing while increasing your impact. For the last 15 years, sammy has worked for startups, established businesses with large teams, nonprofits for profits and everything in between. And here's what got Tim's my attention when we first learned about Sammy and her company One of their passions is to make more impact for more small to medium nonprofits. Sammy, welcome to the show.

Sami Befell-Mulhern:

Thank you so much for being here. I'm excited.

Nathan Ruby:

So did I get everything correct in the intro.

Sami Befell-Mulhern:

I'm going to have you start writing my bio from now on. That was great.

Nathan Ruby:

Well, good, i like to try to make things accurate, so that's good. So well, the first question, and I've been waiting. I've been waiting to ask you this question because I really did get excited when I saw on your website that you really do have a passion for small to medium sized organizations And, as we've talked about, this is really the whole purpose of the practice of nonprofit leadership is to bring information and help and hope and a place to connect for executive directors of small to medium organizations. So why did that? Why is that a passion of yours? Where did that come from?

Sami Befell-Mulhern:

Yeah, so I grew up in a small town in Northwest Iowa but a very philanthropic community, and that nonprofit has just always been in my family life. It's something that we've always done together as a family, something we've always participated in supporting the causes that we care about. Grew up, went to college and started my first nonprofit in 2006 with because I saw a need for visual and performing arts access for kids in small rural towns that don't get to see. You know all of the different styles of music or dance, you know options or theater and all the things. So I started my own nonprofit, not really knowing anything other than what I'd experienced in volunteering and working with other organizations, so kind of trial by file, trial by fire, but it was fantastic and learned a ton. And then through that, like you mentioned, i've now gone on. I worked for a large boys and girls clubs organization. I, you know, did a stint with for profit corporate stuff, and so really what I realized through all of those is that at the heart of what I do, i want to help small organizations make as much impact as possible, because those smaller organizations are really doing the work at the community level that those communities so desperately need And sometimes just kind of play small in their mind. They think, well, we're a small organization, people don't want to give to us, people don't understand what we do or we don't have the right resources that some of these big organizations do. So I really love getting into the mindset of marketing and your website and showing these small organizations that you can have huge impact. You just need to play as if you're in a big city, play as if you're a big organization and you can really see amazing results.

Nathan Ruby:

Yeah, that's awesome, and that's kind of similar to Tim and I, and we both came up in a world of smaller nonprofits. Just like in the for-profit world, it's actually small business that employs more people nationwide, and in the nonprofit world there's all of these small organizations doing tremendous work and making an impact in the lives of people that if they weren't there, it would be missed. They would be missed. There's real work being done, but when you're in a smaller organization, you don't have budget a lot of times, and so you don't have resources to play like the big boys and girls do, and so you get stuck in this vortex of you don't have the right help, you don't have the right support, you don't have the right knowledge, and so your results are not as good, and so you're just in this loop and it's very difficult to get out of it, and so it's exciting to see another kindred spirit in the small nonprofit demographic. All right, well, let's talk about websites. So I think, first off, how do you define the purpose of a nonprofit's website? What is it that you're trying to accomplish by having a website?

Sami Befell-Mulhern:

Well, i love what you said at the very beginning, when you're like I might redo my website and then six months later I'm like this isn't working for me, i need to do it again, and I need to do it again and I need to do it again. So the biggest mistake that we see is we put up a website because we think we need to. We slap all the stuff on there. We have a button to give, might go to a PayPal, check out, something whatever. It's just kind of put up there because we think we need to have it, but we haven't taken the time to really figure out where we're at in our organization, what our goals are and how the website supports that. So the website shouldn't be a standalone thing. It should be an ever-evolving thing that is supporting the goal. So you might be in a brand awareness mode of your organization where you're trying to get more people to understand what you do. You might be trying to get more community members that can utilize your services to come into your organization. You might be launching a big event. You might be in a big fundraising campaign. So really thinking about the goals of your organization, what you're trying to accomplish, and then your website should support that.

Nathan Ruby:

Well, obviously, by what you described, websites are extremely What's the word? I want They're.

Sami Befell-Mulhern:

They're fluid.

Nathan Ruby:

Yeah, and they're specifically unique to the organization, at whatever time the organization is. So there shouldn't be cookie cutter websites, is what you're saying.

Sami Befell-Mulhern:

Well, yeah, and I don't mean to say that that means you have to be changing your website all the time. What that means is taking the time to really figure out the messaging of who you're trying to reach and making it clear who you're talking to on your website. That's critically important. And then there's certain elements of your website that can change as on a regular basis. So we always tell our clients every month we're taking a look at your homepage, because that banner should be changing regularly, which is easy to do. That's not something that's crazy that you need to hire and spend tons of money to do. But that banner should be changing to reflect what is the current most time sensitive thing that you have going on. The order of the things on your homepage might change based off of maybe you're in a capital campaign now, so that's more important. We want people to see that first, but then, when the capital campaign wraps up, we want to make sure we're replacing that in a timely fashion with what's the next big thing that we want people to be paying attention to. So it doesn't mean it has to be complicated, but it just means it needs to mimic exactly what you're doing in your offline communications And I think, at the end of the day, if you ask me, what should your website do? it should build trust, and so you build trust by showing and matching on your website the things that you're doing in the community. When people look you up, they're like, oh yeah, that's what they said to me, or oh yeah, that's right. I want to dive deeper into this And now I can find it because it's easy for me to find, because we just had that conversation. You're building trust. You're continuing to have conversations and nurture and grow your visitors.

Nathan Ruby:

You know. It's interesting that you brought up trust and that they're seeing on the webpage and experiencing what you're doing as an organization, that you're doing what you say that you're doing. And I have a donor in the organization that I lead This is recently the last couple of years and a pretty major donor. And one of the things they said when I asked why are you making this gift and why is it important to you? And the donor said You know, i followed you for a long time. They've done some volunteer work for us. And they said you, the organization, has always done what it said it's going to do And I trust that you're going to continue to do what you say that you're going to do. So that level of trust when it comes to fundraising is really important And your website, it seems, is a place to champion that. It's a place to broadcast that.

Sami Befell-Mulhern:

Well, i mean, think about the experience of going to a website and they still have events up from 2022. They haven't changed any content. There's no impact stories that you know. All the impact stories are from like seven years ago. You know, like that doesn't build trust and it doesn't mean that you don't have that information. You just haven't taken the time to stay up to date on what you've got. And we have to think about I'm a little, this is this is a little bit hard for, like, i'm really passionate about this, but we need to treat our donors as if they're customers in a for profit business. So we tend to think about our donors as well. You're giving to us like we are doing this amazing work you should want to give to us because we're doing all of this stuff. That's not how it works And that's increasingly not how it's going to work as we get into younger generations. We need to be treating our donors as the amazing customers that they are and making them feel like they are the heroes of the organization and we love them and we need them for everything. We also know, then, if consumer behavior if they hear about you, they're going to go and search you to see who you are and figure out. So that's going to be your social platforms, that's going to be your website, and if those two things aren't aligned, you've lost them. Nonprofits have to work so much harder to build trust with people, so you need that. That website needs to really reflect exactly what your biggest mission is right now, and not necessarily everything in the kitchen sink that your organization does. So you're saying that we shouldn't treat donors like ATMs.

Nathan Ruby:

Who did that? Who did that? Who did that? Who did that? I know Novel, so all right. So one of the things that I struggle with in my website is and you brought up having information from 2022 or 21 or your last newsletter was spring of 2020 and you're talking about COVID How I mean? basically, you've only got a couple of options to keep that current. You could do it yourself, which for smaller nonprofits that probably means the executive director, who's got 9,000 other things that they're trying to do. It means you hire staff for it, which is expensive. You hire a high school kid to do it, you know. Get an intern, which that's like a whole nother podcast episode, or you outsource it. And how do you keep that? When I look at all of the pages of our website and our website is not overly aggressive in pages we try to keep it to a manageable number, but, good Lord, there's always something out of date or that's not right on that thing. How do you keep track of all that?

Sami Befell-Mulhern:

Well, listen, there there's a whole conversation we could have about how executive directors spend their time. I think in any small organization, you have more time with your staff than you think. It's just about organizing the tasks and the goals of people. So I'll just leave that at that. I'm sure you've had several conversations with organizations about how we spend time. What I would say is really putting some systems in place to make things easier for you to manage. So create a spreadsheet that has all of the page titles, the URLs and the content. That's like an overview of the content that's on it, from this, like okay, it has this donation page, it has this freebie or this resource, like, just list all of those things out. So then when you make a change let's say you have your annual report and you make a change to that annual report or you need to upload a new version all you have to do is a quick search on that spreadsheet and you know, okay, the annual reports on these 10 pages. I'm just going to go update it there. You're not having to comb through everything. Or if you have a blog, really tracking all of those blogs when the last time it was updated, you just do it in a spreadsheet And that way it's easy for you to go back and figure out what needs to be updated. What can you repurpose before you go back in? With regards to staff time, to make those updates? Again, we are huge fans of the new blog, so we like to do it in chunks. So, if you are doing it yourself, just put the calendar thing or something on your calendar for once a month, maybe the first month. That takes you two hours, but after that it will be so much faster And that's just the time each month that you go through, comb through that website, comb through the spreadsheets and just make sure everything's good. Then, boom, you're done. It doesn't have to be something that takes a lot of time.

Nathan Ruby:

Awesome, that's fabulous, all right. So I have a true false question for you. Okay, true or false? My giving button, or the giving button, a giving button, should be maybe not center page, but we'll just use the phrase front and center on the main page. That is obvious and easy to see and easy to use. True or false? true, okay, so good enough, all right. Next topic I think I go to some nonprofits websites and it's like okay, i'm here, i came here to give, but I don't see a way to give, or it's just it's so I got to click through eight different clicks to finally it's like I don't have time for that. I'm moving on to something else.

Sami Befell-Mulhern:

But and we don't have to spend too much time on this but more importantly than that, gone are the days where you can send people to a third party donation page or a PayPal link. Please, please, please. It is so easy to have a donation page on your website where people can fill out the form on your website and not leave it. And again, that goes back to the very beginning building trust with your, with your donors.

Nathan Ruby:

How do you know when it's time to take the the the time, energy, dollars, cost, effort to do a major over overhaul of your website? and I'll put it in this context You know, kind of like I said when in my opening, most people have a website, most organizations, small organizations, they have a website And but there comes that time where there's a for any organization, there's a transition period from the grassroots monpa, you know, we're we're, you know using our bootstraps type of organization, to, okay, we're we're. you know a little more budget, we're a little more professional, we've made that leap kind of. but our website is so Pedestrian, so basic it's. it's just time to do a major overhaul. How do you make that determination?

Sami Befell-Mulhern:

Well, there's a couple obvious things that happen, like it around functionality. So, let's say, you're opening a web store, or now you're offering registration online and you want to be able to get kids into your after-school program. Or you want people to be able to fill out their pet adoption stuff online. Or, like you know, we're moving in, you're hearing from your donors and your community. You want to build more of that functionality into your website. Maybe you're you're taking some of your programs and trainings and you're going to do them virtually, or you're going to do them online, right, so that's an obvious shift, because that's that's saying okay, well, this website just isn't functioning for us in the way that we need it to, so that's an easy one. The second time that you really might need to think about an overhaul is, just like you said. We see this a lot when, especially when organizations are going from like their working board to more of an advisory board, they finally hired, you know, one or two staff, so it's not just the executive director running everything, right. We're in that period now. We're just like you said. We've got proof of concept, we've got sustainability, we know that we're going to be able to be around for a while And in those first few years of your organization you've been really working on refining and honing in on your messaging and who you're talking to and truly what you do. Because you know, in the first few years even like 10 years it shifts a lot in kind of maybe I thought this is where I could have the biggest impact, but now that I'm in it I need to shift this a little bit and tweak that a little bit. So you know, once you really feel good that you are like this is the way that we're going to drive our impact, then it's a good time First to really pinpoint your messaging and make sure all of that is great, because then that's when you're going to have a website that's going to support you for more than six months for longer down the road, because it is in direct alignment with who you are and who you're going to continue to be for a period of time.

Nathan Ruby:

Is there a sweet spot for and I don't know what the right terminology is, but for number of pages or size of the overall? when do you know enough?

Sami Befell-Mulhern:

I mean, we've done some very simple websites for people that are one pagers, that have all the critical information that they need to be able to communicate, and they wanted a one page website, while they continue to really refine some of the things that they're doing right, because, you know, we do need to have something that's up, that is kind of that billboard type website. I think there's some core pages that we always recommend Your homepage, obviously, your about page, your donation page, which is critically important. A programs or services or impact page, something that really talks about what you do. And a contact page to make it super easy for people to get in touch with you. Those five pages, you're pretty rock solid. If you can get a blog going, we always recommend that. That tends to be extremely overwhelming for people, and we have tons of blog posts that we've written on, like how you can use volunteers to help you create content plans and all that stuff. So I can share some of those free resources with the listeners as well. But you don't need to overcomplicate it. Just make sure that you have some core pages. Start with one, and then what we also say is like pay attention to the conversations you're having with your major donors Pay attention to the conversations you're having with the community. What are they telling you? What questions are they asking you over and over and over again that they aren't understanding? What phone calls are coming in to your front desk all the time? that are the same questions. What objections do people have? Why are they saying no? All of that is great content to put on your website, so you can just start with basic information and then just listen to the community around you and add as you go.

Nathan Ruby:

Some organizations that I have seen, as I'm one that I'm researching as a potential partner for our organization or others. I'm seeing and I don't know if this is a trend or not, it is the very small. I'll call them a micro non-profit a really small non-profit has got a presence on Facebook, but they don't really have a what I would. I'm using air quotes you can't see me, but I'm using my air quotes, a website per se. Their main hub, so to speak, is on Facebook. Is that doable for some organizations?

Sami Befell-Mulhern:

I mean, you got to start somewhere and so I'm never going to say don't do that. But with social media, you own nothing and you don't get the analytics of what's happening, who your users are. You don't have a way to really capture that information outside of Messenger and you have no control over your reach. I don't know what the exact stat is now, but it's something like 2-3% of your followers are seeing your organic content on Facebook, which means content you're not paying for. So while, yes, it's great to have that presence, i think it's so easy to create a simple website, even if it's just your logo, your impact, like your, what you do for the community, and a contact form Like even if that's it. You can do quick and easy websites on Canva now, so nonprofits can do Canva Pro for free. So there's really no excuse to not have something that you can put out there on your own because you want to start collecting that information that you can use to help your organization grow. You can't run Google Analytics to your Facebook page. Now I will say the power in that is that it's going to take your website some time to rank. So if you have a brand new domain and a brand new website. It's probably not going to rank for much at the beginning. So if people are searching for you having those social media platforms, they're always going to show up closer to the top. But that does give you validity and trust. So it's important to have those profiles. But you still need to have a website.

Nathan Ruby:

So is it still a thing? And I read this in a book. I don't remember the name of the book, but the concept was that your social media Facebook, instagram, linkedin, whatever your social were kind of like the spokes and websites, the hub and all of your social media is driving people back to the hub, back to your website, to then take action and whatever action you're asking them to do. Is that still the way it works?

Sami Befell-Mulhern:

Yeah, i mean, i definitely agree with that And I've used that analogy all the time. I think your website is the centerpiece and that's why it needs to match your messaging. But it's not just your centerpiece for your digital marketing. It's your centerpiece for your offline marketing, for your print ads, for your radio ads, for anything else that you're doing. For anything that you're doing, you want to always be driving people back to your website because that's how you can get they can dive deeper, they can get more information. You want to get them on your email list. You want to do all these things right. The hard part about social media platforms now is they're really not rewarding posts that link away. They want to keep all of the social platforms, even Google search you're noticing more features in Google search. They want to keep you on their platform as long as possible because that means they can serve you as many as possible and generate revenue. So really, you have to kind of be creative about how you use those calls to action in social media to try to encourage people. Try to encourage them into a messenger conversation. Try to encourage them like there's different things, like try to get them to comment And then, as they comment on some cool information that you've shared. Then you can direct message them to try to drive them to the website. Like, you have to be a little bit different in how you approach that, because those links that just goes say, okay, read my blog post with a link, nobody's going to see that.

Nathan Ruby:

Yeah, i mean, social media is a. It's a tool and it's a great tool. But I think you have to be careful and over I don't know, maybe this is not a fair thing to say but to over give it more credence than it really does. I don't know, it's so hard. I've had board members current and in the past business people where return on investment is a big, is a big deal and it's like okay, where's we're spending this money and this effort? what's the ROI? Well, it's kind of hard that it's there, but it's kind of hard to pinpoint exactly. All right, we spent $10 and we got this in return.

Sami Befell-Mulhern:

It's really hard to do that It is and what I would say is we. The two areas of focus that I would love to see nonprofits do better and more on is the Google Ad Grant, which gives nonprofits $10,000 a month to run Google ads. So if your website is set up correctly, you're really providing value on your website. You have good content. There are we don't do it, but there's agencies that are out there that are not crazy expensive that can help you spend that $10,000, you won't small to medium size nonprofits won't spend that full $10,000 ever really but it's a great. It's a great option for you and that you can drive people directly to your website and that is extremely trackable. The other thing is email marketing. Email marketing is really underused and you wanna talk about ROI. I mean the stat, for I don't know how many years has been for every dollar you invest, it turns into $36 in revenue on average. Like that's the largest ROI of anything you can do in the digital space. So and like I think social media is like five or 10%, like a or 5%, you know, so it's not even close. So, thinking about your website and how you can get visitors there, how you can convert them into email subscribers, and then how you can leverage those conversations to generate more donations, like that's the loop. The social media piece is great. It helps build trust, but I think we tend to focus too much on that, to your point, and if we focused more on nurturing through email and donor retention through some of these digital strategies, we'd be in a much better place.

Nathan Ruby:

All right, you have this cool tool on your website that I was pretty excited about, And it is a quiz that you could take to see if you are a candidate to do it yourself, a DIY of your own website. Tell us a little bit about that.

Sami Befell-Mulhern:

I mean, who doesn't love a good quiz? right, they're so fun. Ha ha, ha, ha ha. Yeah, so this quiz just walks you through a bunch of questions that's going to help you evaluate your time, your tech capacity, your budget, your staff, kind of, and really give you some feedback and resources on if you have the capacity to do a website yourself, if it's better to have it done with you or it's kind of a co-collaborative option, or if you should just have somebody do it for you. So you'll get your results. You'll get some resources, some free resources, that you can utilize to kind of help you put together a plan for how you're going to tackle this website project, and I'm sure you've talked about this all the time. But one thing that we really need to consider when it comes to a website project is, yes, it can be a little bit more expensive, but also we want to evaluate the loss of income that we're potentially getting or money we're leaving on the table because our website isn't functioning, it isn't getting the right information out to people and also your own time. So, while it might feel good to be like, well, i could just build this myself, spending a little bit of money on the front end sometimes can free you up as the executive director or the development director to do what you do best, which is go get that money. But if you're working directly with somebody who can help you really refine that messaging, then you're working in tandem. It's like the whole sales and marketing piece working together. They have to work together. So the quiz will give you kind of that setup of where are you at, what tools and resources do you have at your disposal And then what's going to be the most painless process to kind of get this all going for you.

Nathan Ruby:

Yeah, that's an awesome tool, And I flunked the quiz right off the bat. One of my ADD kicks in and I have a hard time sitting still for more than three minutes. So right off the bat I could not sit and work on anything computer-related, so the system kicked me out, so I failed. It's all good, but my skill set is raising money, so for me, that time that I would have spent suffering through how to do that is to go find a donor who would be willing to fund that. And that's part of the thing as executive directors is, we all have our skills, we all have our passions, but we don't do everything, we don't have skills in everything, and so you have to figure out where do I spend my time, where do I spend my energy, where do I get staff, where do I get volunteers? Where do I outsource? So any tool that will help an executive director make those decisions, that is really valuable.

Sami Befell-Mulhern:

Yeah, and I also. I just want to this isn't website related, but really, when it comes down to small teams and limited resources, my most favorite thing to do and it's the most uncomfortable thing for my clients to do is really take a week in time track and see where you're spending your time. Have everybody do it You don't have to share it But pull those big buckets and see who's doing double work, like where are you and your organization actually spinning your wheels? And then also what are the things that only you can do? And then the hardest part is for executive directors, especially small organizations, because you're probably a founder also is like letting some of the stuff go. So if you do that activity and I know I'm preaching to the choir here, nathan, but if you do that activity you really might be surprised by the time and space that you have either in your schedule or in someone else's schedule to kind of help with some of these marketing efforts.

Nathan Ruby:

Yeah, it's funny you bring that up. We did a Tim and I did an episode I don't have it off the top of my head is a few back on delegating and learning how to delegate. And if you're leading a small to medium organization, by golly you've got to develop that as a skill, cause if you're holding on to everything, you're never gonna hit your mission, you're never gonna get your vision. You just you can't do it all, and so you've got that's the skill you got to develop.

Sami Befell-Mulhern:

Yeah, how often do you hear well, it's just faster if I do it myself.

Nathan Ruby:

Absolutely. and for the perfectionists it's like well, they don't do it right, so I have to do it the way I want it. Yeah, so yeah, absolutely, all right. well, as we're running down here towards the end, one last question, and we talked a little bit at the beginning about how planning one of the big mistakes, you see, is not doing enough front end planning and making sure that for your website, making sure that the website is consistent with where your organization is and its growth and its development. But what is besides that? what are one or two or three other mistake, common mistakes that you see all the time in organizations and their website?

Sami Befell-Mulhern:

Messaging is a big one, So talking more about me than I'm talking about my visitors. So really thinking about again the statements that your community is saying about your organization. How they talk about your organization is how you should be talking about your organization, because that's how they're connecting, That's how they're emotionally connecting to you. We are in a society now where we want community. We wanna feel like we're a part of something. The transactional fundraising piece that worked really well with Boomers is not the same motivation that's happening with millennials and Gen Z. I could get on a whole nother soapbox about that, but we'll save that for another time. But messaging is critically important and taking time to do that can be a game changer in conversions on your website. The second thing, like you mentioned, is not making the donation page or button easy, And then the last thing I'll mention about that is not having your donation page in your form, mobile friendly. That is critical. If people can't do it on their phone, you're losing half of the donations that are potentially coming into your organization and then making your form too complicated. Don't ask for more information than you need. If you feel like you have to ask all that information on your form, then you don't have a good follow-up plan for how you nurture your donors.

Nathan Ruby:

That's how I feel about that.

Sami Befell-Mulhern:

Yeah, but those two things are important.

Nathan Ruby:

Tell us what you really think, Amy.

Sami Befell-Mulhern:

I know, you know, the digital marketing space has such an opportunity to help nonprofits with donor retention, and so that's really something we're super passionate about, because that, in these times, is what is going to be the game changer for the organizations that still thrive in unstable economic situations and those that don't, and your website can really help support that.

Nathan Ruby:

Absolutely So. all right, amy, how do we get ahold of you?

Sami Befell-Mulhern:

Yeah, so thefirstclicknet has tons of free resources You can. if you want more digital marketing tools or resources, we have our podcast, digital Marketing Therapy. Nathan will have to get you on there sometime soon. I would love to Yeah, let's set that up, but that's really the best place. I'm most active on LinkedIn, but you can find all the information on our website at thefirstclicknet.

Nathan Ruby:

Awesome, all right. Well, your website is a critical piece of your organization. For many people, it is the first impression they have of you, your organization and the people you serve. It is not only a marketing tool, but also a powerful fundraising tool. Will your website ever be perfect? Probably not, but it is important that you and you should be spending time, energy and budget to make your website a great first impression. Well, thank you for listening today. If you are benefiting from what is being shared in this podcast, we would like to ask you to share a review on the platform in which you are listening. Let us know how the podcast is benefiting you. If you would like to get in touch with us, our contact information could be found in the show notes. That's all for today. Until next time, check it out today.