John began his career developing e-learning and expert systems before moving into business application and web development. He co-founded Sereno with Rod fifteen years ago. John concentrates on developing digital strategies with Sereno's charity partners and leads on design.
It's often the case that charities first use recommendations and Google to engage a digital partner to help with a site rebuild. However, some of the most successful redesign projects start with a period of internal negotiation and planning. Apart from normal bugeting and timescale setting, charities should take the time to review their site anlytics and think through their goals. Where is their current site failing? Where is site traffic coming from? Which search terms or social media channles are visitors using to find content? What is the best perofrming content?
Two years ago, at the Drupal conference in 2017, Dries Buytaert, Drupal’s founder, discussed the ways in which Drupal could leverage its sophistication and power and not compete with small website building platforms that take care of all the design and hosting for you - eg Wix, Squarespace. Drupal has always excelled at flexibility, security, scalability and providing industrial strength websites.
Drupal site owners have a wealth of choices when it comes to maximising visibility on search engines. You have to keep your content relevant and up-to-date but by thinking carefully about the tools on offer, you can make the most of your content and see improvements in your rankings.
When you publish content, make sure you give your content a title that really makes it clear what your content contains. Don’t reuse titles either as this won’t help your content when it’s being indexed.
Website donations generally play an important role for charity websites, although they may not be the primary source of funding; indeed, many charities do not rely on individual donations at all.
Where a charity does require a donation feature, it’s fair to say that the development of an effective system understandably causes anxiety and debate. The main challenges that charities often face are:
While we never know what’s round the corner in the world of digital and the third sector, we’ve seen a number of interesting trends emerge in 2018 that will grow further in 2019. Here’s our take on what’s next for digital in the UK charity sector.
We have undertaken many migrations for clients from existing content management systems to Drupal. These moves are prompted by a number of factors, and include:
We all know it can be a lot of work to keep your charity intranet vibrant and all used. That said, here are half a dozen really quick and easy ways to improve your intranet and make it more useful and visited by your staff.
While I want to look specifically at social intranets in this article, I should first point out that the business case for any intranet is in general poorly understood. While it's possible for Comms teams to go to senior management with a case for a new or revised intranet, it's unusual to see KPIs rigorously reviewed after the first year. Indeed, while evidence is hard to obtain, it's clear to anyone working in the sector that the overhwelming majority of intranets are not often measured against meaningful benchmarks.
It's been interesting to watch commentators deal with the recent revelations over Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. While the #deletefacebook campaign has gained some traction, many critics of the social media giant are reluctant to close their accounts. This is because they rely on Facebook to help promote their message and they may be worried that removing themselves from the platform will diminish their ability to effectively campaign to the widest possible number of supporters.
There's no doubt that concerns over GDPR are now starting to become more urgent for our clients as the regulation comes into full effect on May 25th.
I've been doing a lot of reading and attending events on GDPR so feel somewhat informed now and can share some headlines that I hope will be of use to Comms and Marketing people working in charities. There are many aspects to GDPR but my focus is here is how this might affect the way in which charities can work with their digital agency suppliers to make the most of the GDPR opportunity.
