Dear [FirstName],
 Natural disasters and their associated human catastrophes have been all too prevalent this year. Our thoughts are with all those affected.
In this issue, we see how ACC International Relief was able to rapidly launch their online disaster relief appeal for the tragedy in Japan. We also look at our donations module which helped enable their rapid response.
Improve your website content by:
- writing for a web audience; and
- keeping track of your website performance.
Jonathan Oxer
Founding Director, Internet Vision Technologies
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 Writing for the Web
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As with any form of communication, when writing for the web you need to keep your audience in mind. This is not just about who they are and what they’re interested in, but about how they’re accessing your information.
Writing information for the web is different to writing printed material like brochures.
What are some things you should consider when writing for people on the web?
- Reading on the web is an active activity, not a passive activity.
- Readers are engaged in the process, they make decisions and are keen to move to the next step.
- They may be browsing lots of web pages to find the information they need.
- Unless they’ve specifically sought out your site, they’ll probably make a very rapid decision about whether to stay or move on.
- They’ll perform a quick scan of your web page to see if anything captures their attention. Research shows:
- They control what they read and where they’ll go next – including deciding whether or not they want to scroll further down your page or use any of your links.
So what strategies should you use when writing for the web?
- Firstly, put yourself in their shoes - think about how you behave when looking at information on the Internet.
- Think about the reasons they may be on a particular page, and make it quick and easy for them to satisfy that need.
- Most pages should be quite short, with targeted, concise information.
- Put the most important information up the top.
- Draw out key phrases and words with headings and bold text so they scan the information that you want – and try and keep these in the F pattern.
- Include lots of white space. Use:
- Short paragraphs, and
- Bulleted lists.
- Help them find more information - use hyperlinks effectively within your content to draw them further into your site.
- There are always exceptions. Ultimately they may be after a lot detailed information, and sometimes a long web page or PDF is the best way to present it. But they want to know they’re accessing the right information before they read it, and will scan until they’re satisfied they’ve come to the right place.
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How's your site performing?
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Your web application is a tool to help deliver the strategic goals of your organisation. Just like any other part of your organisation, you should:
- set goals for what your web application is there to achieve;
- monitor the progress to achieving those goals; and
- make appropriate adjustments to content and functionality.
Your web application should also be used as a market research tool to provide feedback into your organisation.
IVT’s web applications can provide you with information to assist with monitoring your website goals, and with market research.
One of the tools for doing this is the “Analytics” area of our web applications. It allows you to track a variety of metrics about how your application is being used including:
- How many visitors you’ve had to the site, including which of these are new and which have come back for another look.
- How long visitors stay on your site for.
- How many pages were viewed by visitors.
- How many visitors accessed each page, and how long on average they stayed on the page.
- Where visitors came from to access your site – such as direct access, from searches, or from particular referring sites.
- What keywords in search engines resulted in visitors to your site.
- Revenues and quantities of products being sold on your site.
You can access this information at any time, including viewing graphs.
You can also schedule regular email reports of specific information such as:
- Visits
- Top Traffic Sources; and
- Top Keywords.
All of our newer sites have Analytics automatically enabled. All sites have the capability though.
View instructions for enabling Analytics in your site.
Contact IVT if you have any queries about setting up or using the Analytics Dashboard.
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ACC International Relief - Investing in technology to change lives
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 ACC International Relief has a long history of providing local and international disaster relief, community development and child sponsorship. While proud of the results they had achieved, their experiences responding to Victoria’s Black Saturday bushfires helped them recognise there must be a better way to respond.
Since Marketing Manager Wesley Cooke started in August last year, they have revolutionised how they respond to disasters. This has resulted in never seen before levels of engagement with donors, allowing them to raise an unprecedented amount more when compared with that of donations two years ago. The strategies for achieving this included:
- Creating a media and content heavy website;
- Launching appeal donations on the website, including tracking of progress goals;
- Sending custom email appeals out to their donor database; and
- Online advertising.
They launched their new website in November, and were able to rapidly see the results with responses to disasters in Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia and Japan. They have greatly expanded their supporter base, including receiving a large number of donations from overseas for the Queensland floods.
With a presence on the ground in 30 nations, they had a representative they could talk to in Japan in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake and tsunami within hours. They immediately deployed a multimedia presentation to their website, including a recording of his phone call, and launched their appeal.
Wesley contacted the media to help raise funds. One of their first questions was always “Where’s your website”. On looking at the site, they immediately took ACC International Relief seriously and the advertising started within a few days. The Queensland flood appeal was launched on two major radio stations, one in Victoria, and the other in Tasmania.
Wesley recognised investing in a modern web application could only help their cause and change lives. Despite launching only 6 months ago, Wesley is confident the site has more than paid for itself already, not just in monetary value but also from a brand perspective. It has allowed them to show their donors that they are committed to providing access to information in a powerful and accessible way.
ACC International Relief continues to transform the way they change lives, supported by IVT. They are about to launch an application, which will revolutionise child sponsorship. Wesley anticipates exceptional growth in the number of children they will be able to support, with minimal additional administrative overhead. This new system will allow a clear and powerful way to gather data from all across the globe and use technology in some of the most creative ways to achieve amazing outcomes for children in need.
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Donation Management
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 Along with our web content management system, a key component of ACC International Relief’s success was our Donor Management System. This module allows organisations to:
- define causes to raise money for;
- set separate, changeable goals for each cause;
- visually track progress to each goal on your website;
- receive cause specific donations;
- receive one-off or recurrent donations;
- securely manage finances without having to store donor’s financial details;
- automatically generate and send tax-deductibility receipts; and
- manage pledges.
If you link this module in with our eMarketing module, it enables targeted communication to donors based on causes they have already donated to.
This module will be a core component of our soon to be released Nonprofit Online application.
Contact IVT for more information..
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