For charity websites, there are three main classes of calls to action, though you can of course get more specific if you so choose. These three, in order of visitor commitment, are Learn, Help, and Give.

Learn
The simplest call to action, and the one that requires the least commitment from your visitors, is to read more of your site. For some nonprofits, such as public education and awareness campaigns, this is the primary goal, though the others should come into play too. If educating your readers about a certain topic is important to you, then make sure that as many pages as possible have links to a central page with that topic. If you have a sidebar along the left or right of every page of your site, you may want to put links to this central page there, especially if it is time sensitive. For example, the leader of a local AIDS foundation will want to not only write a separate page about the upcoming AIDS walk, but link to it from several prominent places on the site. If your site is a blog, or uses blog software like Wordpress, think about listing Related Posts at the end of each page. Here’s a great list of Related Posts plugins for Wordpress. This won’t provide the control over links that you get from writing them all yourself, but it’s easier, less time-consuming, and does a pretty good job of finding things that the reader will be interested in.

Help
While some readers will want to remain just that, readers, some will be so inspired by your site that they will want to do something to help. This may sound specific to volunteer organizations, but nearly every nonprofit website can and should take advantage of this kind of traffic. Helping doesn’t just mean working at a soup kitchen or donating services. It can be as simple as clicking a link. Providing links to spread the word about your site can be a great way for readers to help you without a lot of commitment from them. Provide a Twitter button to “Tweet about this”, or a Facebook button to “tell your friends”. Look around the web for awards and contests that you can enter, like Name Your Cause, then link to a page that lets your visitors vote for you. It not only makes them feel better, but it involves them more in your organization, and can lead them back, and you might even be able to convert them with the highest level of nonprofit call to action …

Give
We will be talking very soon about the best way to set up online donation for your site, but regardless of how you do it, you must give your visitors a way to give to your organization. Ideally, whether it is on your sidebar or on individual pages, the reader should always be just one click away from donating. There is nothing more frustrating to me than finding a nonprofit website that I love, and finding it difficult to donate to them online. The user that finds your site and is willing to contribute to your cause is precious – make sure you’re allowing them to do so. Now, that does not mean being annoying and having a massive flashing green donate button. In fact, let’s just make it a rule that you should never make anything flashing at all. But make the option available to them, and make sure it’s not easy to miss.

The importance of analytics
My boss at my day job is constantly repeating the mantra of web analytics – “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it”. I recommend that all nonprofit websites, regardless of size or technical knowledge, install Google Analytics. It’s free, it’s easy to install and use, and it gives you basically all of the information that paid packages do. All you have to do is put a short bit of code at the end of your pages, and suddenly you have information on which pages your visitors are seeing, how long they are staying, and most importantly, whether your calls to action are working. Play around with things like different donation buttons and different kinds of links, until you see improvements in how many visitors are doing what you want them to do. It’s also incredibly fun to look over your stats and see where your traffic is coming from, and what they seem to like the most on your site.

Unclear calls to action are some of the classic rookie mistakes of new nonprofit sites. Remember that your visitors only know about your organization what you tell them, and that includes what you want them to do. For the most part, if they have found your site, they are interested in your cause. Work on converting that interest in the most efficient way, and everyone comes out of the experience more satisfied.

Other helpful posts
Using Google Analytics to Track a Nonprofit Website (FrogLoop)
Google Checkout for Nonprofits – One choice for simple donation buttons
How to Write a Call to Action for Your Brochure (Nonprofit Marketing Guide)

Just so we’re clear for the rest of this post, I will refer to a full name as the title of the organization, like The National Organization for Women, and use the term domain name to mean the web address of the organization, like now.org.

The Kiva Route: Short, Sweet, and Foreign
If you haven’t heard of Kiva, stop reading this post and go there now. They are a fantastic microfinancing site that allows donors to make small loans to entrepreneurs in developing countries, and as a member myself, I can’t say enough positive about them. They are also a great example of one strategy in online branding. “Kiva” is Swahili for agreement or unity, and a good name for the site for a few reasons. First, it was short, and available. These days, it is nearly impossible to get a four-letter domain name, but the shorter, in general, the better. Second, and just as importantly, the use of a Swahili word was appropriate to their mission, since Africa is one of their main focus sites for loans. If your organization works internationally, or with an indigenous group, using a non-English word might be a great way to get your hands on a short domain name. Remember to keep it as easy to say and write as possible. If you ask five people to spell the word, and get five different spellings, that might not be the name for you.

Kiva vs. Keywords
Though Kiva has a great domain name, it didn’t do much to help them on one front: search engines. Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft’s new-fangled competitor, Bing, are the most important way for people to find your site. All of these search engines use different processes to rank one site higher than another, but they share a few things in common, and one is the importance of link text. When another site links to yours, the link text (like the word “CharityGeek” in this link to our homepage: CharityGeek) is often the name of your site, and every time a link like that is created, your site ranks higher in the search engines for people searching by that text. What this means for your branding decision is that you should consider putting key search terms into your domain name. If you work with children, consider a name with “children”, “child”, or “youth”. If you work in a very specific region, that can be a very useful thing to add to your name. For example, I live in Portland, Oregon, and if I search Google for “Portland charity”, one of the first organizations to come up is The National Charity League, Portland Chapter (http://nclportland.org). The domain name is still fairly short, but the full name has both “Portland” and “Charity”, and the domain name has the word “Portland”, and that helps with search engines a lot.

Search for the name before you buy it
So, maybe you’ve found a great name. It rolls off the tongue and gets a great keyword in, too. The easiest thing to do would be to let those fingers do the running over to the first domain registrar you can find and grab it before someone else does. But before you do that, take the time to search for the full text of it. Maybe childrenofmoscow.org is available, but childrenofmoscow.com is the site of a death-metal band that doesn’t exactly share your community values. Although you might get some extra accidental traffic from sharing a name that’s similar to one taken by an established site, that traffic might not be full of the sort of visitors you want. Just another point to consider.

A brand is more than a domain
Before you buy your domain name, also consider what other branding you might do for your organization. One important one, and more so by the day, is Twitter. Check to see if your domain or full name is taken yet as a handle on Twitter, by going to http://www.twitter.com/yourname. For example, our fledgling Twitter account is @charitygeek, and I definitely checked Twitter before deciding for sure on the name. Also check around other social networks like Facebook, to see if anyone else has thought of that name already.

As an organization, your brand is the first thing you really own, and in a very real way, as the head of the organization, it becomes a part of your name. Every time you introduce yourself to a prospective donor, you’re no longer just “Bob Smith”. You’re “Bob Smith, Save the Otters”. It’s one of the biggest and first decisions you have to make, and like the name your parents gave you, your organization may have to live with it for a very long time. Hopefully, this article helped you a little in making that choice.

Other helpful posts
The Effective Strategy for Choosing the Right Domain Name (Smashing Magazine)
Checklist: Choosing a Domain Name (Reuters)