Web Hosting for Nonprofits

One page carries the year

Look at when the money arrives and the shape is the same at almost every organisation. Giving trickles along all year, lifts in the autumn appeal, and then a large block of it lands in the last week of December. Some of it lands on 31 December itself, in the evening, from people making a decision before a deadline.

That concentration is the whole story. It means the donate page is not one page among thirty. It is the page. It also means the cost of a failure is not spread evenly. A donate page that breaks in March costs you a few gifts. The same failure on 31 December costs you a meaningful part of the year, and there is no second chance at it, because the reason people are giving that day is that the year is ending.

What actually goes wrong

Rarely the server. In practice the failures we see are boring and preventable, and most of them were introduced by somebody trying to improve the page.

• The donate button points at a form or platform page that was retired months ago, and nobody clicked it since the spring appeal.
• The page loads a video, a photo gallery and three tracking scripts before the giving form appears, so on a phone the form is below a long wait.
• The certificate on the domain lapsed and the browser now shows a warning on the one page where trust matters most.
• The site was left on an old version of its software all year and something breaks the week you cannot afford it to.
• The appeal email links to a page nobody tested on a phone, and the phone is where most of that email is opened.

None of those are solved by a bigger plan. They are solved by somebody clicking the donate button in early November, on a phone, and following it all the way through to a real charge.

Getting the donate page through December

This is a short annual routine rather than a project. Do it in early November, while there is still time to fix what you find.

1. Give real money to yourself

   Not a test mode transaction. A small real gift, on a phone, on mobile data rather than the office wifi, following the exact path a supporter takes from your appeal email. Then check that it arrived in the account, produced a receipt, and appeared wherever you track donors.

2. Time the page

   Open the donate page cold and count how long until the giving form is usable. If a video, a slideshow or a bank of tracking scripts loads first, move them off that page. The donate page can be the plainest page on the site and it will perform better for being plain.

3. Check every route in

   The button in the main navigation, the button in the footer, the link in last year's appeal email, the link in your email signature, the link in your social profiles. Old links outlive the pages they pointed at. Click all of them.

4. Confirm the certificate and the domain renewal

   Both should be well clear of the end of the year. If either renews in December, move the renewal or make certain the payment card on file has not expired.

5. Take a backup you have actually restored from

   A backup nobody has tested is a hope, not a plan. Confirm you can get the site back, and know who to call at eight in the evening on a Sunday. The website backups page explains what a usable backup looks like.

6. Freeze the site

   From roughly mid-December, stop making changes. No plugin updates, no redesigns, no new landing pages built in a hurry. Almost every December outage we have seen started with a well-meant edit made during the busiest week.

Six steps, one afternoon, once a year. It is the highest-return hour of work available to a small organisation with a website.

Volunteers, events and the forms in between

The other thing a nonprofit site does all year is collect people. Volunteer signups, event registrations, mailing list subscriptions, contact from someone who needs your help. These are quieter than donations and they are where most sites leak.

The leak is almost always the same one. A form submission is emailed to a single address, that address is a personal account belonging to whoever set the site up, and when they leave, the emails go into a mailbox nobody opens. Weeks of volunteer signups vanish and nobody notices because nothing looks broken.

The fix is to send form notifications to an address on your own domain that more than one person can read, and to keep a record on the site itself rather than relying only on email. If you are still running the organisation from personal addresses, the business email page covers what changing that involves, and moving existing mail across is on the email migration page.

Event registration is worth one specific warning. If you run one large event a year and you sell tickets through your own site, that is the one day when traffic genuinely spikes, because everyone hears about it at once. If you use an external ticketing platform, the spike happens on their servers and not yours. Either is fine. Just know which one you have chosen before the day.

How AldoMedia helps

AldoMedia has built and looked after websites for Western New York organisations since 1999, and nonprofit sites with a donate button nobody has tested since last winter are familiar work. We are an independent authorised reseller rather than the operator of the underlying platform, which means we will tell you plainly when the plan you already pay for is the right one and the problem is somewhere else.

If you have inherited a site from a departed volunteer and are not sure what you are even holding, start there. Call 716-771-2536 or tell us what your site runs on, and if it needs moving, the website migration page explains the order of operations that keeps your email working through the change.