The Chronicle of Philanthropy has a great article about what prevents people from giving online (Confusing Web Sites Discourage Donors From Online Giving). What does it come down to? Bad design.

Nielsen Norman Group, which conducted the research and wrote it into this report. A summary of the biggest problems, which I can testify are the same problems we fix too:

• Poor presentation of the charity’s mission
• No information on how contributions are spent
• Poor page design and unclear content makes it hard to find how to donate

Most of those issues are text related, so make your changes right now.

[Image: Flickr user tarop]

If you’re anything like me, Fridays, especially rainy ones, are big days to look around other people’s blogs. I use it as a time to keep an eye on the industry, see what kinds of thoughts are out there and spend some thoughtful time learning. Not that I’m avoiding work or anything …

In a spirit of sharing, I’d like to present some of my most frequently visited tech-oriented blogs so you too can have something to do before 5 p.m. comes.

Enjoy:

Religious Blogs

Church Marketing Sucks: A good all-around marketing blog, but especially useful for congregations.

Center for Congregations: These guys are based in Indianapolis but do a lot of good work that congregations anywhere could learn from.

CO-STAR blog: A client of ours that explores synagogue life. The staff posts info on spirituality, collaboration and sometimes technology.

Web Design & Development Blogs

Smashing Magazine: I can’t get enough of this excellent resource for design. So, so many good ideas in here.

Read/Write Web: “Web Technology news, reviews and analysis.” Lots of non-profit worthy stuff on here too.

Productivity Blogs

Lifehacker: One of my favorite sources for useful tools and tips with an especially technical angle, but not completely.

Unclutterer: A blog about getting organized that’s useful for anything from the filing cabinet to the sock drawer.

Never one to shy from a bit of self promotion, I wanted to share this list of 100 (Non-Design) Blogs that Every Web Designer Should Read. Friendly Web Tools makes the cut!

But I also wanted to mention it, because this is a tidy list of what really are some of the most useful blogs out there to do with the Web, even if you’re a web design newbie. Nice collection!

Also, check out my post on the blogs I visit most often.

This Halloween I might dress as the economy. I can’t think of any scarier. You’re right to be scared too, especially if you’re a nonprofit and beholden to funders, because you’ve got to make the case why you need a good website.

Hold on. Reality check: you aren’t thinking of cutting funding for your own website, are you? That would be a grave mistake. Websites are not only the public face of your organization, but the best tool you have to information and create a community on a budget.

Now that we’ve got that straight, let’s look at the top 10 things your website should have so that it gives you a good return on your investment. And just hanging in there won’t cut it. People will stop visiting your site – and thinking about your organization – if they don’t see some worthwhile action happening online. This is one of those times you need to invest.

In no particular order (because they’re all important), here are 10 things your website simply must have and that will wind up saving you money.

1. Contact form. You can always post your e-mail address on your website, but be prepared to be overrun with spam. Avoid this by putting a contact form on your site to make it easy for your website visitors to reach you and to avoid spammers at the same time. You might also think of adding a Captcha to your form.

2. A place for feedback. This could be a contact form, but better yet, let your website visitors leave comments. This might be on your blog, on news postings or on articles. You can also allow ratings, which lets people cast their vote.

3. Consistent navigation. Make sure people know where to go on your site by putting your navigation in the same place everywhere.

4. Regularly updated information. Freshness keeps people coming back. At the very least, make sure you’re cycling through new content on the homepage on a weekly basis. Blogs and Twitter accounts make this an even easier way to create an online community through content.

5. Analytics. Try a tool such as Clicky or Google Analytics to find out when people are coming to your site, where they’re from and a whole load of other stuff. Analytics tools are way more powerful than a counter.

6. Donate now button. If you’re a nonprofit that accepts donations from a constituency, make it clear and easy.

7. Address front and center. A street address. With a phone number. Do it.

8. Search tool – for your site, not someone else’s. A search box will help your visitors find exactly what they need. But don’t make the mistake of putting a Google search box or a search tool from another site on yours. You just make it easier for people to leave.

9. Really good URLs. This starts with your web address (I know nonprofits are swimming in alphabet soup, but don’t make everyone else guess your acronym). Then make sure you have Clean URLs installed throughout.

10. A CMS. A content management system will make these things a bajillion times easier to do if you have a publishing system in place. Here’s how we do it.

One of the most popular posts on the Talance blog has been my list of my favorite church websites. I’d like to revisit the topic with five techniques on these killer church sites that we use in super fast and easy congregation websites.

The City Church

http://www.thecity.org/

The City Church has a nice website no matter how you cut it, but what I love is the Latest Message. It’s a frequently updated sermon you can listen to from the homepage of the website or download to listen on your iPod later.

Generation Church

http://generationchurch.org/

Officially, Generation Church is part of the aforementioned City Church, but what they’ve done is smart by not shoe-horning their entire congregation into a one-size-fits-all website. Instead, they launched the hyper-cool, widget-laden Generation Church site for their youth ministry while keeping a more conservative site as the flagship.

Houston NW Church

http://www.hnw.org

The Houston NW Church site is a little too cool for school, but I really like their “Find Life Here: What To Expect at HNW.” They’ve forsaken the About Us page and decided to instead create a kind of users’ guide for new visitors right on the homepage.

Stonebriar Community Church

http://www.stonebriar.org/

People read websites from left to right and from top to bottom. Stonebriar has learned the lesson well by putting the most important information in the top left corner of the page: Service Times and Location. No chance of getting lost or mixed up with this.

Kaleo

http://kaleohouston.com/

This website is ultra simple – it’s just a blog using a standard, open-source theme. But what’s good is that Kaleo is remembering that a website isn’t a phone directory listing; it’s a tool that you can use to connect with congregants. Pastor Bill is a great blogger and explores themes front and center with anyone who comes to visit. If only he’d turn on comments, it would be all the better.

Normally, I find “This site has moved” messages annoying. There are better ways to divert people from an old site to a new one. But I was glad to see a message on President Barak Obama’s Change.gov website. Now you can follow him on WhiteHouse.gov. Welcome back, White House website!

My favorite feature is the blog, where you can keep tabs on policy updates and calls-to-action, like the national day of service. A great site for non-profits to watch to keep up on policy changes that affect them, but also as a solid example to emulate.

Yesterday, I celebrated the White House’s return to technology through Barack Obama’s multitude of gadgets.

Today, I want to talk a little about the role technology is about to take in policy. It matters to charitable organizations, because the new administration’s proposed technology policy recognizes the power of a connected population. It opens up information and allows people to share freely. Obama-Biden’s concerns about technology can be directly applied to a technologically lagging nonprofit world.

Take this phrase from the official Obama campaign website and replace every instance of “America” or “the United States” with the word “nonprofit”:

America risks being left behind in the global economy: Revolutionary advances in information technology, biotechnology, nanotechnology and other fields are reshaping the global economy. Without renewed efforts, the United States risks losing leadership in science, technology and innovation. As a share of the Gross Domestic Product, American federal investment in the physical sciences and engineering research has dropped by half since 1970.

It’s the same argument I’ve been making for nonprofits embracing technology for ages. It’s the reason behind this blog.

You should read the whole technology plan to understand what’s afoot, but here are a few key items on the agenda to pay special attention to:

• Say, “Hi,” to a new Chief Technology Officer. This isn’t the same Cybersecurity czar that the Bush Administration appointed, whose job was to lock down systems against online attacks. The CTO’s job will be just the opposite: to open the office up, including making sure officials hold open meetings that are webcasted and to introduce blogs, wikis and comments, which let regular Americans like you and me weigh in on issues that matter to us. In fact, Obama said he wants us to be able to comment for five days before legislation is signed.
• The Internet will stay open. A key reason the Internet has been such a success is because it is the most open network in history … Barack Obama strongly supports the principle of network neutrality to preserve the benefits of open competition on the Internet. Users must be free to access content, to use applications, and to attach personal devices. Because most Americans only have a choice of only one or two broadband carriers, carriers are tempted to impose a toll charge on content and services, discriminating against websites that are unwilling to pay for equal treatment … Such a result would threaten innovation … It would also threaten the equality of speech through which the Internet has begun to transform American political and cultural discourse.
• Open recruitment of regular citizens. Establishing pilot programs to open up government decision-making and involve the public in the work of agencies, not simply by soliciting opinions, but by tapping into the vast and distributed expertise of the American citizenry to help government make more informed decisions. This should sound familiar to all the congregations I’ve advised to make use of lay leadership. They may know more than you do.
• Broadband for everyone. As a country, we have ensured that every American has access to telephone service and electricity, regardless of economic status, and Obama will do likewise for broadband Internet access. This includes refining how we use the wireless spectrum – you’re already experiencing changes here with the move to digital cable. Have you gotten your converter box coupon yet?
• The White House is getting a website again! Lifting the veil from secret deals in Washington with a web site, a search engine, and other web tools that enable citizens easily to track online federal grants, contracts, earmarks, and lobbyist contacts with government officials.

There are billions of fonts out there, which makes it darned difficult to identify one by sight. That’s doubly difficult if someone presents you with a graphic of a font. You can’t exactly look that one up in the font drop-down menu in Word.

Instead, you plug it into What the Font?! In their words, “Upload a scanned image of the font and instantly find the closest matches in our database.”

And it works amazingly well for identifying a mysterious typeface.

It’s a good probability that at least one in 20 people can’t see everything on your website. That’s because a higher number of people than you probably expected are color blind in some way. Some statistics I’ve seen say that as many as 18 percent of people have some kind of visual limitation.

Around 90 percent of the people I tell this fact to are shocked – the rest know it because they’re used to not seeing everything on a website. But what if they’re missing something terribly important, like a news alert or a call for contributions or all your website navigation?

I love the Colorblind Web Page Filter because it makes it easy to see what your website might look like through a color-deficient eyes, those that can’t see red/green or blue/yellow.

For some help choosing the right high-contrast colors for your site, try the Color Laboratory. It’s handy because it “allows you to select colors and see how they appear next to one another, and in various foreground/background combinations. It also allows you to see those colors as they might appear to color-blind users.”

Makes the incredibly important job of picking the right colors easier.

[Update: make sure you check out this other post on more killer church websites and the specifics that make them great. Also check out our easy solution for church/synagogue websites.]

During yesterday’s e-seminar Help! No One’s Using Our site (which we’re offering again, because some people who couldn’t make it asked for an encore performance), the topic of killer church websites came up.

I like to recommend church websites to nonprofits or for-profits, because some of these sites are masters of community building. Think about it: the Christian church was built on and survives on reaching large numbers of people, many of them new, and creating a community around them. They see the web as a ministry tool, and some of them have done wonderful jobs with their websites. A great lesson for any site looking to create community.

Here’s a list of my four favorites. Seen any others that you love? Tell me about them in the comments.

Mars Hill Church
http://marshillchurch.org/
A model of clean navigation. I especially love the “I am new here” button on the top left. What a great way to draw new people in – so much more engaging than “About Us.”

Revolution Church
http://www.kcrevolution.org/
If they sold websites in Urban Outfitters, they’d be stocking Revolution Church. Just beautiful, and excellent use of social media.

Fellowship Church
http://www.fellowshipchurch.com/
An enormous church that addresses a big congregation well. Very easy to see where the closest sermons are. And they’ve done a great job with new ways to address pastor Ed Young.

Saddleback Church
http://saddleback.com/
You’ve heard about this, because it’s where Barak Obama gave a speech. But it’s a nice website that gives a lot of information in an engaging way. I like the FAQ-style menu on the homepage.