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.
Option 1 - stay with the technology platform you have and rebuild.
This option is definitely the easiest provided you are happy with your current digital partners and hosting and support service. If your admin experience is fine and your support agency are helpful and responsive, your best option will be to rethink your audience, your priorities and goals and redesign your site. You’ll have no need to retrain and get used to a new CMS plus you can keep your data where it is which is a huge attraction.
If you are seeking a new digital partner for your charity's website, or are looking to improve the way your site is hosted and supported, the following guidance should help.
While large charities may have the digital expertise or budget to deploy effective donation systems, this is not generally the case for small to medium sized charities. This is because the donation landscape is confusing, costs variable and the levels of expertise and technical knowledge required for comprehensive solutions are very often beyond the reach of small busy charities lacking deep pockets.
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.
Sereno Charity Websites & Intranets
Sereno builds bespoke websites & intranets for charities in Drupal.
