It helps to see what other organizations are doing right to guide your own Web strategy. Here are six stand-out examples from non-profits that have a presence with websites, Twitter and Facebook.

Websites

10ThousandDoors.org is a gutsy move by the United Methodist Church to be a truly interactive experience. The whole site is innovative, but the Talk page is a new breed of discussion boards that has really opened up sharing and communication.

Take the Walk has a great counter on its homepage. They tally the number of miles supporters have walked to support fighting AIDS in Africa. The placement is perfect: front and center. This ensures the site is geared toward pulling in new supporters.

Twitter

Ashoka started promoting their e-book through Twitter and quickly built up a following. This multi-tasking post is smart, because they thank their followers, help everyone feel included and continue the promotion all in one Tweet.

The town of Richmond, VA, had a double-header of a good idea. First, they started a city wiki (others here), and then they set up an automatic Twitter feed that publishes any updates to the wiki. It gives you a real-time, accessible view of any changes that happen at the town level.

Facebook

Peta launched a Facebook Cause to raise funds and donations to protect animals. They’ve raised nearly $60,000 and have enabled others to recruit more supporters and raise funds on their behalf.

Synagogue 3000 claimed a great web address so they’d be easy to find on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/synagogue3000) rather than the ugly and hard to remember stream of numbers that Facebook adds to the end of your URL when it assigns one to you. Click here to set yours.

[Have a question you’d like answered? Use the comments form at the bottom of this page to submit it. We’ll review your question before posting (don’t be shy about asking!) and get back to you with a response.]

One feature of a Facebook Page for organizations is a Favorites Pages block. This lets you bookmark other Pages that you like or somehow related to yours. It’s a great tool for cross-promoting and partnerships.

Facebook is long on features but short on usability, so figuring out how to use this feature isn’t perfectly clear. But here’s how to do it:

1. Go to the Facebook Page that you want to add to your Favorites.
2. Look at the logo on the upper-left-hand side of the page, and directly below it locate the link that says “Add to My Page’s Favorites.”
3. Click that, and it puts it in your Favorites box. Click it again to remove it from your Page’s Favorites.

If you administer more than one Page, you can choose which one to add it to.

Practice now by adding Talance’s Facebook Page to your Favorites.

Twitter updates come as fast as you can draw a sharp breath, but they may not be as spontaneous as they seem. Thanks to a selection of scheduling services, you can create tweets ahead of time and post them in the future, while you’re busy with something else.

Delayed tweeting isn’t the best strategy for building relationships with your followers (can you imagine having your half of a conversation an hour before you meet a friend for lunch?), but it can help when you want to deliver a message but aren’t able to.

For instance, if you want to notify everyone about a new project you’re launching on a set day. You can schedule the announcement to go out while you’re busy setting up said project. Or say you’re at a conference getting ready to speak. You want to tell your followers you’re about to step on stage so they’d better bustle down to the conference room, but you need to give the live audience your full attention.

Here are some tools you can use to set your tweets into the future:

• Hootsuite
• FutureTweets
• TweetLater
• Twuffer
• Calendar Tweet

[Photo credit: Adopt a Pet, Live Longer! by sayheypatrick, on Flickr]

You may already have a Donate page on your website where you make it possible (and easy) for people to support you. But how many people click through to your Donate page compared to other pages of your site? I’m willing to make the sad bet it’s not at the top of the list.

Some pages, though, are stars. They consistently receive more visitors than other pages. This might be the Dog of the Week adoption page or your contact information page. People either love or need what’s there, so they come back, day after day.

While you should stay true to the main focus of these pages, start to think of them as a way to reach out to potential donors by putting a call to donate on these busiest pages of your site.

To find which pages pull in the droves, tap your Web analytics service, such as Clicky or Google Analytics. Most have a section that lists the top 10 or more pages in terms of traffic. Pick the top pages from this list and ask people to support there.

It helps if you can elegantly work in the plea for funds with the focus of the page. If it’s the Homeless Dog of the Week page, for instance, you may want to include something like:

“Can’t take Buster home? Support him and his doggy friends by donating $20 right now by clicking here.”

That’s it. Stand back, keep checking your traffic and donation box, and see if your income doesn’t increase. Make sure to come back and tell us how it went.

Getting your website to work for you doesn’t have to mean a complete overhaul. Here are five small updates you can make without suffering.

1. Add a feedback form

One of the very best ways to get more use out of your website is to give its visitors a way to interact. If you add a contact form to your contact page (here’s an example), you’ll open up opportunities for accepting comments. It’s welcoming, will help limit spam, and can increase the amount of feedback you receive from your site. A pretty big payoff for something so small.

2. Make menus consistent

Clicking through the pages of your site should not cause motion sickness. Yet some websites have inconsistent navigational menus. Sometimes they actually jump around. Sometimes the options change. Sometimes they don’t even work. Make them consistent and reliable, and you’ll find more people will be clicking around.

3. Limit what’s on your homepage

You wouldn’t stuff all your house’s furniture into the foyer, would you? Same thing with all the content on your website. Put your front-page stories on the homepage, and tuck the rest of the information where it logically belongs.

4. Add some links to and from your social networking accounts

Many organizations have well-used Facebook, MySpace or Twitter accounts, but you’d never know it from the website. Do some cross-linking, and add some links on your site. (Note: Join for the Talance Facebook Fan Club, and we’ll give you some lovely social media icons.) People can learn more about what you do, and they can subscribe to your accounts and receive updates and reminders.

5. Launch a blog or microblog

Even if you update it just once a week, a blog is a great add-on to a website. It increases your chances of telling the world what makes you so great, and it keeps people coming back for more.

[Photo credit: London Underground Emergency Response Unit (WX07 NWJ) by policeblue999, on Flickr]

One of our loveliest, sweetest clients contacted us a few weeks ago with a sad story we hear too often. She’d lost her website. Actually, she knew it was going to happen, because every year at the same time, the site went down like clockwork, and it took precious time and effort to resurrect.

This happens from time to time, especially to people looking to save some money by registering with a bargain basement Web host. As a confirmed cheapskate, I’m not blaming. But sometimes you really get what you paid for. Web hosting is hardly ever very expensive, and it’s worth spending a couple hundred dollars a year on a service you can trust.

But that doesn’t help if your website is caught in some netherworld where you can’t reach it, and you can’t reclaim control of the web address. Here’s a checklist of things you can do if something like this happens to you:

Call the Web hosting accounting department.

Maybe it’s an accounting error, and your payment went through late or not at all. Check with the billing department at the Web hosting company to make sure you’re paid up.

Make sure your domain name is still registered.

You have registered your domain name (i.e., yoursite.org) for one or more years, but you have to renew the registration when it expires. You’ll usually get a tickler e-mail that you need to pay, but you might have missed that message or it was sent to an old e-mail address.

We recommend our clients register their domain names for 10 years.

Your domain name is registered through a registrar for a certain number of years. 30 days before your registration is up, you should receive a bill by email. If you have changed emails, of course, you won’t receive that bill! If you don’t pay that bill by the due date, your web site disappears from the public view. If you wait 30 days longer, it’s no longer your domain name.

The bad news is that domain name might have already been picked up by what I think of as the slum lords of the Internet. People and companies that troll around for high-traffic domain names and snap them up if they expire. Your options in this case are limited.

Sign up for ICANN Arbitration.

You may have some hope of getting the domain name back if you have a trademark on it, thanks to ICANN’s Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP). To win the arbitration, you need to prove that

1. your domain name is identical or confusingly similar to a trademark or service mark in which the complainant has rights; and
2. you have no rights or legitimate interests in respect of the domain name; and
3. your domain name has been registered and is being used in bad faith.

You don’t need legal counsel, but it helps, and you can count on paying $1000 for it. Usually what happens is whomever registered your domain will sell it for just shy of that amount.

Buy it back.

You might have to suck it up and buy it back from the company that snatched it from you. It’s probably cheaper than fighting.

Get another, similar name.

If it’s a small enough site, you’re better off just getting a new domain name and updating all your contact information.

In preparing for an upcoming presentation on how to create functional websites, and it’s got me thinking about all the dysfunctional sites I’ve seen recently. There’s no single feature that makes a website completely unusable, but there definitely are trends.

Below, divided into three categories, are the chief gaffes you should follow if you really feel like creating a website that doesn’t work.

Market Positioning

Build your website without thinking what you want. “Yes, we need a website!” is a lousy reason for a website, yet it’s the one too many people follow. First, make a list of all your organization’s goals, and then think about how technology might help you meet those goals. Then from that you can start to think about shaping your website around your needs.

Don’t think about who’s looking at the site. If your audience is made of 50-year-old women from the Midwest, why would you create a zippy website built to attract college students? If those people are interested in volunteering, why would you load the homepage with information on grants, staff bios and news releases? Think about what the people coming to your website want or need to see, and then give it to them.

Design

Use lots of clipart. Ooph. Steer clear of crummy clipart. Go for real pictures, even freebie stock photography, rather than goofy cartoon drawings. Check out the Creative Commons images on Flickr or Stock.xchng for good resources.

Include pictures of empty rooms. What’s welcoming about an echo-y chamber? Put some people in there!

Use flashy splash pages. They look like ads and have the same effect. People click off splash screens and never get to the meat inside. It’s like going around with two hats on. The top one doesn’t matter and makes people think you’re nuts.

Use a microscopic font. You know how on TV ads, they put all the stuff they don’t really want you to read, but are required by law to display, in teeny text at the bottom of the screen? It’s because no one can see it, and they ignore it even if they can. Small font does the same thing to your website, but the whole website.

Honestly, tell me how readable this is.

Usability

Shroud donation processes in mystery. Heavens, if people want to give you money, make it easy for them. Here, take this big bright Donate Now! button and put it on your homepage. (Right-click and choose Save As.) A gift from Talance to you.

Glom onto every widget you can find. A real danger with the proliferation of widgets and plug-ins and add-ons is that you have a website that looks like a carnival. All flash, no focus. Choose wisely with anything you add onto your site, and make sure it follows your directive of achieving your goals.

Add 50 items – or even 10 – to your menus. People’s eyes cross when they see more than seven items in a menu, so stick with that magic number.

Put the most important info at the very bottom of the page. People look at the top left of web pages to pick up the most important information. If there’s something you really want people to read, put it up there and not down below.

Asking for monetary support should be integrated into every website belonging to a non-profit, synagogue and church. But there are other ways to let your members give than just writing a check.

Web developer Jeff Robbins had a great idea you can replicate for your charitable organization. He has developed a slew of tools for web developers for free, but for those who want to show their gratitude, he created an Amazon wish list full of tools and trinkets from all price ranges that he wants or needs:

And he’s getting them. His fans have bought him books, podcasting equipment, and other tools that he uses in his work.

It works because sometimes it’s easier for people to give support when there’s a tangible goal in mind. It’s the same reason I prefer to give my niece and nephew an actual gift for their birthdays rather than a check. I can picture them using the gift instead of simply absorbing the cash.

Money is great, but supplies cost real money, so you might as well make a list of them and ask for donations. Does your organization need a netbook, printer, digital recorder, books, hanging file folders, office printer, snacks for the lounge – anything that Amazon sells, which is basically anything? Set up a wish list, and you might be surprised at what you get.

Many people will take the time to set a simple auto-response to go out when someone writes them an e-mail. It’s usually something like “I will be out of the office until Tuesday, 4/14. If necessary, I can be reached at …” Talk about a missed opportunity!

Why not get a little fancy with this message and do a bit of promotion while you’re at it? After all, you have to write something there anyway, how about adapting one of these lines for your next out-of-office reply:

1. I’m out of town and can’t respond to your message until next Tuesday. While you’re waiting for me, check out our blog at http://talance.com/blog
2. I’m not checking e-mail while I’m out of the office until Tuesday, but I’m still Twittering! You can get a daily dose of what I’m doing at http://twitter.com/talance
3. I’m out of the office until Tuesday, but I’ll be celebrating our latest website launch the whole time I’m away. Check out http://massmentors.org and tell me what you think.

The best part? You don’t have to do any extra work to do a little promotion.

Number crunching is the kind of art you don’t appreciate fully until you have to do it. As we were analyzing the data from the social media report, one of the biggest challenges we had was finding the right kind of chart to represent the trends we were seeing.

A big help would have been Chart Advisor, a little experiment from Microsoft Office Labs. This division plays around with prototypes and ideas that you can try before they’re fully released. Chart Advisor, according to the website, “ … was created as a concept test to explore new ways Excel users can create graphs quickly and effectively. Based on the data in your spreadsheet, it identifies, ranks, and displays an array of charts most relevant to you so you can make the most out of your presentation.”

Give it a shot and see if it helps you crunch your numbers.