Charity Partners – Wingrove-Services

Need a bespoke CRM system? – Call Graeme Neale

If you have either reached a point where you might benefit from a CRM System (Customer Relationship Management) or your old one has fallen into disrepair or has been withdrawn from the market then you might like to check out Graeme Neale, (Email address: gnh@pmvideos.com )

I have virtually met Graeme through the website redevelopment for Home-Start North West Kent where he has been building a new CRM system for them to replace MESH which is withdrawn later this year.

Graeme charges a flat fee for the development of the system, provides training and maintenance for a year, after the initial period; ongoing maintenance and support is negotiable.

If you are looking around, or considering just using spreadsheets, it might be worthwhile sending Graeme a message to see if he can help.

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Ripping off Charities

I was approached by someone requesting help with their charity’s website. She was the chair of the organisation. As with most of my connections with people it was largely word of mouth and recommendations. They connected through my website.

This was also significant in that I was using the Tawk.to app on my website and cell phone, and while sitting watching TV they popped up and started to ask questions. (Check out Tawk.to on your site).

Anyway it transpired that this organisation had their website rebuilt by a commercial organisation. The fees were high, and it was very difficult to edit the site, and they were seeking more control.

I offered to look at the site to get a feel for what might be involved before making any commitment.

It turns out that the developer had charged them £750 for a FOUR page website. Plus there was nothing notable about the design, it was based on a template that cost around $28. There was more…. The developer had a minimum charge of £105 whether it was a 5 minute job or a 3hr one. (They charged £35 per hour). In correspondence it was clear that the developer was offering to update the website as it was running on old plugins and an older version of WordPress. They would not click on the update button for free, they would charge the client for that service.

I requested access to the website to find that all of the editors had “AUTHOR” rights and were very limited on what they could do. This would mean they had to go through the developer to get anything done. And of course pay a fee.

This is one of the reasons I work with Charities. I thought it was absolutely appalling that a developer could charge £750 (for an at best £100 website) and the website could be locked down in this way, with the client having practically no control and having to do everything through a developer whose charges started at £105. This is the worse example I have come across in the past 9 years of doing this.

Solution

This charity is my most recent addition to my client list. As I did not have full access to their website I rebuilt it externally, using a new template in my hosting. I increased the pages to incorporate GDPR, Terms and Conditions, Accessibility and a few other things. The site is now around 12 pages and has a more robust structure and is more mobile friendly than the former site.

All of the editors now have Administrator level access and can see all of the site and change it all. They also have multiple 10GB mail accounts available, training built into the webiste, and I will run a Zoom session with them shortly to show them how to develop the site further. The cost? £0 for the development work and £60 per annum for the hosting. I cannot do that for everyone that approaches me, but this was an awful case of a small charity being ripped off by a commercial and allegedly professional developer. I have spent a lot of my time in the commercial world, some of it in very high margin businesses, but even based on my experience, this was an excessive case of profiteering.

You should always be in control

My philosophy is very simple. I give you the same level of access rights as I have. Which also means you can break the site if you do not know what you are doing. All of my clients are free to take their websites somewhere else and have access to the hosting control panel and domain name. I provide free training to ensure that you can edit your site and not incur any editing expenses if you wish to do that. Which ultimately means you can spend more of your budget on the services you provide to your clients.

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Questionable Advice?

I have had several requests over the past two months to add “DONATE NOW” buttons onto all pages on a website. One request in particular came via a voluntary advisor which seemed totally flawed to me. However I can appreciate that most of you are dependent on “external voluntary experts” of which I guess, I fall into that category too. So here is my take on it, like all gifts, you can choose to accept it or not. It is just an opinion.

When you look around the web, particularly on charity sites you tend to see the Donate buttons plastered everywhere. The advice given to my client was to add a link under the button which goes directly to a preferred fundraising portal. Say for example Virgin Money Giving. That sort of sounds ok, but I disagree, for several reasons:

1). Let us assume I have arrived on your website, I am not that familiar with it, I have looked around and now I wish to make a donation to help you. So I click on the Donate Now! button. What happens?

It takes me to a completely different website, it may have your logo there, but it has someone elses logo there too, I am not sure if this is a scam or not, so I leave. Did you get your donation? No.

There is a web standard called WCAG2.1 which states that a link that opens in a new window, or takes the person off of the website needs additional text to advise the user before they click. Think of it as a best practice. You cannot do that here. Let us look at another case:

2). I am familiar with your organisation, I have visited several times, and I can read (!). I want to make a donation. If I want to make a donation, which page would I go to? Chances are you have a Fundraising page at the top of your menu. That is where I would go. I did not need a button plastered everywhere.

The Donate Now button is not dissimilar to someone on the street asking you for money; they have not established a compelling case why you should give them money, but they are asking anyway. Chances are most people will ignore it.

It is much smarter to sprinkle Donate Now buttons within the content on your site AFTER you have just made a case for why it might be a good idea to donate. It is more subtle, less “in yer face”. While I have no firm evidence to support this, I suspect it will be more successful than the former method which has the subtely of a sledgehammer.

If you must, do it this way…

If you must put a Donate Now button everywhere, it should really link to the fundraising page, or the page in your website which lists the various methods of raising funds. In this way the user is still on your website. So within the page you can explain that by clicking on a link or icon on this page you will be sent to the fundraising partner page, specifically to your account on that page, and it will open in a new window.

By doing it this way, you conform to best practices in WCAG2.1, and you are holding the hand of the donor and reassuring them as you take them to the appropriate website.

I personally would be more likely to donate that way rather than the sledgehammer approach.

Why the sledgehammer approach…

I am being disingenuous really, I don’t think people really mean to use the sledgehammer approach, but I think there is a reason why they propose to do it this way. Fundamentally the person making the recommendation is making an assumption: they love your charity, everything about what you do, and as such they are already bought into the value you provide. So in their case you do not need to engage into a sales pitch, they are already sold. So the button is all they need. Well that is fine for them.

But your adviser is not your average donor!

However the people you are hoping to donate to your organisation are not bought in yet, so you have to do that as a separate activity. Taking them to the fundraising page first is vitally important. Of even greater importance, sprinkle those donate now buttons within your content, say after a moving testimonial from one of your clients, or a case study. I think you will have much greater traction with your market.

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Online Referral Form

From time to time I am asked about whether it is possible to add an online referral form. While anything is possible they can get very complicated and if you wish to add conditional elements into the form as well, the complexity rises further. If one also considers making some fields mandatory, then the complexity rises further and you run the risk that the form cannot be submitted because some element is missing.

Just for the record

I have looked at a number of solutions, but so far have not found one that universally works for all. But if there is significant interest I can look again.

Form Using Standard Form Plugin

I currently favour Contact Form 7 as a contact form plugin. It is one of the most popular ones out there. I also use several add on plugins as well. I know there are some additional plugins which can be used to control the formatting and make conditional entries into the form. But for a newbie (i.e. you), it is going to be a bit difficult to get your head around all of the things the form can do.

But it is possible, however the form would likely be submitted in several parts for very complicated forms.

Adobe Form Solution

I am aware that if you subscribe to one of the Adobe products relating to PDF management that it is possible to embed a PDF form in your website which a user can fill in online. However this solution is very expensive (for charities), so I have not looked at this in any further detail.

Google Forms

Here there are several choices, but from my earlier experience there were limitations which might affect your users. Google offers a suite of programs available to people with gmail accounts. If you are a chrome book user (very simple low cost computer), you will know that while you cannot run MicroSoft Applications on your chrome book, you can run equivalent applications which are compatible with the popular Office Apps. All of this is free. But you need to be using Chrome as a browser. Not all computers will have Chrome installed. So this may block this path.

G-Suite

There is a business version as well of G Suite, which is not particularly expensive. There is the basic version of G Suite at 6$ per month, Business at $12 and Enterprise at $25. It includes secure communications, office type apps run online, calendering and various other things. Find out more here: https://gsuite.google.com/

The detail about Google Forms can be found here: https://gsuite.google.com/products/forms/

What I am not sure about is from a privacy standpoint where is the data collected and stored (you need to know this from a GDPR perspective,) whether it is encrypted, and whether copies are held somewhere. But most fundamentally, will it work in FireFox, Safari, Edge, MS Explorer etc, in other words anything apart from Chrome. If it does not, then it is a non starter.

Add a special Form Manager

There are websites that can be built exclusively for collecting data. I know there are some free ones available within the hosting, I have played with one in the past called Lime Survey, but if you are not editing things on a daily basis, then the learning curve might be a bit steep, if you need to edit something.

Use an iFrame

Some of you are now using a 3rd party system in the office to replace MESH (Home-Start users). Some of you will have your own systems. When you view a video on your website, you are looking at an iFrame or a window, through which you can see another website. In the video case it is YouTube. It is potentially possible to show the form you use to enter data into a system from a form submitted to you, but display the form directly to the user through the website. It largely depends on your form, and whether there is a way of displaying it and limiting what the end user can see of the rest of the system.

But this might be worth exploring if you are interested.

Where to from here?

The fundamentall problem is research in this area, and subsequent development is very time consuming, I am sure there are solutions out there, but so far I have not found one that fits all of the requirements. If you are interested in solving this problem let me know. If I can find enough interested parties I may look into it more detail later this year. Let mew know if you are interested.

One last point which is also potentially possible

Part of the problem for the back office is processing the incoming form data copying it across from one system to another. There are generally scripts that can be created for the receiving system which will populate a form from a document that is submitted to it. Contact Form 7 allows very precise formatting of the incoming data. It is conceivable that someone could write a script that takes the incoming form via email, identifies the fields and copies the data across automatically at the touch of a button. I cannot do all of this, but if there was an agreed standard for the submission from your website to your organisation, then someone associated with your organisation could write the backoffice processing script which would overcome the manual re-entry and save a lot of time.

BT My Donate is closing

Several people have told me that they have been informed by BT My Donate that the service will close in the summer. BT My Donate was one of two donation collection services I have recommended in the past. If you are stuck now and wondering what to do, you could try opening an account with Virgin Money Giving. I believe there is a set up fee, but after the account is set up it is pretty transparent on costs which are roughly a 2% transaction fee common with all financial transactions involving cards.

Virgin Money Giving is a non profit organisation whose operation is funded by Virgin Corporate. BT My Donate was the same.

There are many fundraising partners out there, and many of them take a proportion of the proceeds to fund their operation. Said another way, you either have to pay a fee to make your donation, or what the charity receives is less than what they paid. There is nothing wrong with this, all of these operations need to be funded some how. But Virgin Money Giving has an edge over many of them because you are not contributing to their operating costs.

Does anyone have any other fundraising partners they are using that are not charging large monthly fees, or big percentages on the donations? If so drop me a line and let me know and I will add them to this post. Send me a message: contact us

Promoting Sponsors

As I pretty much exclusively deal with charities, most of you are seeking support through traditional funding sources which we all understand have been drying up during the recession, and will probably continue to do so. Some of you however are looking at novel ways of getting sponsorship from organisations.

There is currently an example at the bottom of the home page for Home-Start Gosport and Fareham based on the south coast.

In this case anyone landing on the home page and working their way down the content can see that the organisation is recognising the sponsorship of the Local Property Index. It is simple to add an image, and place a link under the image to the sponsors site. If the sponsors site is using Google Analytics then they will be able to tell how many referrals came from the website.

Some may consider an advert like this to be a little too obtrusive, it could have been added elsewhere. This is ultimately a decision made by the client.

However the lesson here is know that it is easy to do (and remove) and it can generate revenue for you with the right sponsor.

You can see the site here: http://www.homestartgosportandfareham.org.uk go to the bottom of the page to see the implementation.

Check Out TT-Exchange

I was asking a few questions prior to a new website deployment the other day that related to which mail client the office had in use. This particular group had the Home and Student version of Microsoft Office. I asked how much they paid for it, and they had three seats at around £90 per seat. This is the full commercial price. The Home and Student version of MS Office does not include Outlook. So they still needed an email client or they would need to handle all email through a web based client.

Great Deals for Charities!

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News on MS Office 365 deployment (for free).

Further to my earlier comments about working with a remote group who are trying to set up and acquire Office 365 for free (on a charitable basis), we have worked through the email settings that are required to get mail from their domain redirected to Office 365 Outlook today. The next step is the group need to apply for the Applications by registering their charitable status with the provider. More on this once I hear back from them. If they get past this last hurdle then they will have access to the lastest MicroSoft applications at zero cost.

I have also located a Microsoft article on how to get Office 365 for free. You can find it here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/nonprofits/office-365 to apply to try it for free go to the bottom of the page (on the website link) and start there.

If I am looking after your email and/or domain name I can help change the server settings so that MS Office 365 will work for your organisation. All you need is someone at your end to make the changes to your systems and lead the migration.

Also check out TT Exchange; I put a brief article together on this organisation.