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Free Digital Resources For Charities

colin adam — Wed, 21 Nov 2018 19:14:32 +0000

Free Digital Resources For Charities

At Contact, we’re looking forward to #GivingTuesday. We are frequently approached by charities who have little or no budget and don’t know where to start when it comes to building their online presence. With that in mind, we thought we’d develop this resource highlighting the free digital resources that charities have access to. We recently launched a new website for Stuart Anderson, a trustee at the Glasgow Children’s Hospital Charity. Additionally, we’ve been happy to help the mentoring charity MCR Pathways with their hosting & digital strategy.

We will continue to update this resource over time. If you have any suggestions for resources to be added to this blog then please email Colin.

Index

1. TechTrust Exchange

2. Office 365 + G-Suite

3. Google Ad Grant

4. Hosting

5. Website Technology

6. Community Management

7. Social Media + Graphic Design

8. Stock Imagery, Fonts + Icons

9. Sales + CRM

10. Email Marketing

11. Donation Platforms

12. Conclusions

1. TechTrust Exchange

For UK based organisations, the TechTrust Exchange allows valuable access to discounts available through various vendors and is a worthwhile resource for charities. UK based charities must register with the exchange to become eligible for the Google Ads Grant. Additionally, the exchange hosts various other discounts available to charities. They often range in the 10% mark.

2. Office 365 vs. G-Suite

G-Suite for Nonprofits offers full G-Suite however, it has far fewer core apps than Office and caps cloud storage at 30GB per user.

For charities that engage in teaching G-Suite comes with the added advantage of Google Classroom – the LMS developed by Google for school classrooms which can be appropriated for other educational uses.

Both Office 365 and G-Suite come with “app builders”, allowing you to interface with databases in a simple format.

Choosing between Office 365 and G-Suite is tough and it depends on several factors, including the age and digital experience of your staff. People who have worked in offices over the past two decades are likely to be familiar with the Microsoft Office suite – particularly the desktop version – while younger people and more recent graduates are likely to have collaborated intensely using Google Docs.

Both Office 365 and G-Suite offer similar levels of functionality across the core apps – with Google perhaps having a more user-friendly and collaborative interface while Office offers more advanced functionality for spreadsheet aficionados.

Office 365 “Donation” (where your charity receives the software as a donation from Microsoft) includes the web version of Office apps (no Desktop software) and includes Exchange and Outlook to allow you to manage the email accounts of up to 300 users. Cloud storage is capped at 50Gb per user.

Office 365 Premium (the one that includes desktop versions of the apps) is available at £2.30 per user per month (down from £9.40 user/month for regular businesses – representing a 75% discount).

G-Suite for Nonprofits offers full G-Suite however, it has far fewer core apps than Office and caps cloud storage at 30GB per user.

Both Office 365 and G-Suite come with “app builders”, allowing you to interface with databases in a simple format.

G-Suite for Nonprofits offers full G-Suite however, it has far fewer core apps than Office and caps cloud storage at 30GB per user.

Both Office 365 and G-Suite come with “app builders”, allowing you to interface with databases in a simple format.

Office 365 Premium (the one that includes desktop versions of the apps) is available at £2.30 per user per month (down from £9.40 user/month for regular businesses – representing a 75% discount).

G-Suite for Nonprofits offers full G-Suite however, it has far fewer core apps than Office and caps cloud storage at 30GB per user.

Both Office 365 and G-Suite come with “app builders”, allowing you to interface with databases in a simple format.

3. Google Ad Grants

For those that don’t already know, Google offers up to $10,000 pcm in free advertising for nonprofits in what is called the Google Ad Grant. If used correctly, these ads could form the greatest source of traffic to your website. As free digital resources for charities go, this is the mother-lode. It is not, however, easy to implement.

There are additional limitations placed on a charity that are not placed on a traditional Google Ads account:

No Display Network advertising, only text-based Google Ads (formally known as AdWords)

Your maximum cost-per-click (CPC) will be $2 (meaning you can’t compete on higher-value/more competitive terms)
You cannot bid on single-word keywords (apart from a few specific terms)

These limitations may mean that your charity will require the help of an experienced Google Ads professional to implement the grant properly. However, if you do manage to use your Google Ad Grant correctly, you can drive more than $10,000 per month worth of value to your nonprofits. Success stories, where the Google Ad Grant has been used to drive donations or participation with charities can be viewed here.

There are additional limitations placed on a charity that are not placed on a traditional Google Ads account:

No Display Network advertising, only text-based Google Ads (formally known as AdWords)
Your maximum cost-per-click (CPC) will be $2 (meaning you can’t compete on higher-value/more competitive terms)
You cannot bid on single-word keywords (apart from a few specific terms)

4. Hosting

While some individual hosting companies do offer to host charity websites for free, we’ve yet to find one that offers everything for free – including the SSL certificate required to keep your website secure and GDPR compliant.

Azure for Nonprofits is a cloud hosting service provided by Microsoft and can be used to host apps or websites. Every charity can leverage up to $3,500 per annum’s worth of Azure service credits. Additionally, nonprofits can access up to $1,500 of Azure Active Directory Premium.

The Amazon-owned AWS cloud service offers $2,000 in credits to nonprofits. While this is a generous sum, it does appear to be a one-off donation compared to Microsoft’s annual amount.

What should be noted about these cloud services is that they require a generally quite advanced user to implement them properly. For example, this guide to implementing WordPress on AWS has a suggested implementation time of 1-hour – which is approximately 59 more minutes than the “one-click WordPress” that many other hosting services offer.

5. Website Technologies

What do you do with a lot of free hosting? Well generally, you need to start with a Content Management System that can be installed to your server. WordPress, Umbraco and Joomla are all free and open source.

WordPress is, by far, the most popular CMS in the world and is relatively user-friendly. If you’re building a website from scratch in WordPress and have a budget of zero we’d recommend a free base theme like OceanWP or WP Astra paired with the Elementor Page Builder. You won’t be able to achieve everything that the pro licenses would entail (and, to be honest, you won’t be able to build a professional class website without the help of a professional) but it offers something quite user-friendly and accessible.

If your charity wants to take donations directly through your website or offers merchandise then Woocommerce – the free e-commerce plugin for WordPress – may be the way to go. It integrates with PayPal out of the box and, as we’ll discuss later, PayPal doesn’t charge processing fees to charities.

6. Internal Community Management

While Office365 for Nonprofits offers an intranet solution in the form of Sharepoint, it is a deeply unfamiliar interface for most users. Facebook Workplace for Nonprofits allows the deeply familiar Facebook interface to be used to build engagement among staff members and volunteers.

Some of the world’s most prominent charities including the World Wildlife Foundation, Unicef and the It Gets Better Project use Facebook Workplace to co-ordinate staff and volunteers using the apps they’re already familiar with.

7. Social Media + Graphic Design

Canva offers its premium Canva for Work product to nonprofits for free. With the use of brand kits and team templates, making simple graphics for social media couldn’t be easier. Canva are also currently beta testing Schedule, a social media scheduling platform, that will be directly integrated into its work platform. This will make it, as far as we’re aware, the only free social media scheduler for charities.

Until Canva Schedule becomes available for everyone, Buffer offer 50% discounts on their social media scheduling software for charity.

Adobe, whose Creative Cloud is the backbone to most design exercises, offer a 15% discount to nonprofits.

8. Stock Imagery, Fonts + Icons

Images and fonts can be expensive but they are crucial to expressing your cause on the internet – whether on your website or in social media posts. Luckily, plenty of websites now offer free stock photography under the Creative Commons Public Domain license or similar. Unsplash, Burst by Shopify and Pexels are a good place to start. Google Fonts is a great source for free fonts that can be delivered easily while Ikonate offers icons that are free, open source and accessible. The resource All The Free Stock is a good place to go to find new additions to the world of free stock.

9. Sales + CRM

Hubspot CRM is free. For everyone. They have some free resources aimed at charities looking to improve their donation rates as well as several free certifications in various sales and marketing skillsets. There are several charity-themed CRMs in the UK that are either free or have free tiers such as Donorfy and Donation Manager RedCloud which may be suited to a fundraiser’s workflow.

10. Email Marketing

Sending newsletters to supporters, donors and volunteers is a key way to keep a community active around a charity. Most of the main emailing marketing platforms offer a free tier. Mailchimp’s free version allows you to have up to 2,000 email subscribers and send up to 12,000 emails per month. They also offer a 15% discount for nonprofits and a 10% discount for accounts with two-factor authorization enabled. As the discounts are applied individually, this stacks to a total 23.5% discount.

11. Donation Platforms

Most charities require donations to keep running. As there are a few large donation platforms this creates a lot of administration in making sure your charity is capable of receiving donations everywhere.

Amazon Smile

Charities can register with Amazon Smile so that 0.5% percentage of their supporters Amazon sales goes to them instead. This allows for a passive giving style – if your supporters are shopping with Amazon anyway then this can be a reliable source of extra income for your nonprofits.

Facebook Charitable Giving

Facebook is actively encouraging giving on its platform – prompting people to set up fundraisers for their birthday, for example. Over $300m was raised in Facebook’s first year of Birthday Fundraisers. Facebook, along with PayPal, are matching up to $7 million in donations on Giving Tuesday (the day after Cyber Monday) in the USA. In the UK, PayPal are matching up to £50,000. While Black Friday has been internationalised successfully, Giving Tuesday lags behind. All money raised through Facebook giving goes straight to the charity, with no processing fees involved (in partnership with PayPal).

Paypal Giving Fund

The PayPal Giving Funds allows charities to take donations, with GiftAid, without charging any fees. Additionally, they provide donor and donation report and issue receipts and grants. As donations can often be cut away by processing fees, this represents good value for charities looking to take payment. PayPal Giving can also integrate with the PayPal Here card reader for charities looking to take payments in person.

Wonderful, Justgiving, Virgin Giving, BT Donate etc.

Through running, bake sales and other events your supporters will often take the initiative to raise money for your charity by themselves. While this is great, it often falls on the charity to check that they can be donated to through the platform of the supporter’s choice. Money Saving Expert has created this resource to show which donation platforms give the highest % of a donation to charities with wonderful.org, the PayPal Giving Fund and Facebook giving 100% of donations + Gift Aid (where eligible) to the charity. Some, such as MyDonate charge a flat fee on card processing while JustGiving charges both a card processing fee and a 5% charge on donations.

12. Conclusions

I think we’ve shown that is it quite feasible for charities to establish web presences, perform daily office tasks, and advertise to the world for next to nothing thanks to the generosity of several key platforms. Free digital resources for charities are everywhere! Although we’ve tried to highlight as many user-friendly options as possible, being able to implement much of this relies on having access to a skilled digital professional – whether an IT pro or a developer. If your charity cannot afford to hire a professional like this, you may be able to access skilled volunteers through a programme such as Reach Volunteering, who connect skilled professionals with charities. Being able to effectively implement these digital resources should cut costs, improve efficiency, and the increase the impact of your charity online.

A Quick Chat...

We find a simple 15 minute conversation is enough to work out if our services are right for you.

Bonus - Text Messaging

We kept to our promise and have been keeping an eye out for new free digital solutions for solutions.

For charities and non-profits looking for text messaging solutions twilio.org are offering a $500 “kickstart credit” (worth roughly 80,000 text messages) and discounts on ongoing Twilio usage. This is ideal for charities who use SMS for fundraising or for organising.

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What to Do When You’ve Just Set Up A Facebook Page

colin adam — Fri, 07 Sep 2018 09:51:06 +0000

Many businesses in the B2B arena may have initially ignored the benefits of having a Facebook Page altogether or may have set up a placeholder. There are circa. 60 million Facebook pages for businesses. This is truly dwarfed by Facebook’s almost 2 billion users. Facebook has performed something of a miracle as they’ve created the second most powerful advertising in the world where business is underrepresented. Facebook is a consumer-facing platform after all – where people come to interact with their friends and family in a non-professional manner. However, access to the second most powerful advertising platform in the world is too good an opportunity for B2B companies to ignore so here are our top tips for companies that have just set up their Facebook page:

Pick a suitable layout

Not all Facebook pages look the same – and for good reason. Some businesses, such as restaurants and cafes, might want to emphasis booking, chatting on Facebook Messenger or menus while other businesses – particularly in the B2B arena – might want to emphasise content as they have a strategy around building trust and qualifying leads through a content marketing or inbound strategy. Facebook allows you to change your page layout at any time (Settings > Edit Page > Template) so feel free to experiment but keep in mind the question “How do I want people to interact with my business?”.

Get your images & hours of business in order

Generally, populating your page with as much accurate information as possible and styling it up to reflect your brand is as good a starting point as any. There are plenty of blogs out there detailing the intricacies of nailing your Facebook cover out there (such as this one by Buffer) but ultimately there are just a few things to consider:

A Facebook cover used to be limited to a static photo. A cover can now be a photo, a photo carousel or a short video.
Facebook covers display at different aspect ratios on desktop and mobile. While there are technicalities we could discuss here, the basic gist is to keep text away from the edges of your cover.
Use high-quality imagery. Facebook limits the cover at 851 x 315 (there’s no point at looking at Facebook on your 4k TV yet), and while this represents a reasonably low pixel density on today’s smartphones, please don’t upload a small image, as Facebook will stretch it and it will look bad.
Also, add your business hours! Customers want to know when they can contact you.

Verify your page

Verified Facebook Pages receive a tick of verification and appear higher in search results. The verification process involves either receiving a robocall from Facebook to a phone number associated with your business or the upload of company formation documents or bills addressed to your company.

Verify your Page by going to be Settings > General > Page Verification

Select your Call to Action

The primary call-to-action on your Facebook page will most likely be the primary way people will interact with you on the platform. Contact Us, Book Now, Shop, Make A Donation, Message and Watch Video are all options, and all have potentially very different outcomes. Be sure to pick the right one for your page.

Invite to like

No one wants a page with no likes. By using Invite To Like, you can leverage the goodwill of your friends and family to support you and give your page a like. This feature is also pretty useful when you have Facebook content that gets shared more widely as you can ask people who like a post of yours to like the page.

You can invite to like from your page by scrolling down to the Community box.

Ask customers to review you

Reviews are great social proof when marketing. By asking your existing customer base to leave a review on your new Facebook page you can add some much-needed legitimacy to your Facebook presence. Avoid asking your employees or family members to leave unwarranted reviews. You’re not fooling anybody.

Set up your services or products

Showcase what you actually offer to the good people of Facebook. While Facebook’s e-commerce offerings have always been lacklustre, the ability to give your page visitors a quick idea of what it is you offer isn’t a bad thing.

Start posting content

Nosey people scroll. And they keep scrolling. Start fleshing out your Facebook presence by posting regularly even if the audience isn’t there yet. This means that visitors to your page can get a much more comprehensive view of your brand and its perspective.

Add Page Roles

Are you going to be the one person who manages your Facebook presence including advertising, posting and replying to messages? If not, you’ll need to enlist some help. Add staff members to your page by going to Settings > Page Roles. Remember that an Admin has the highest level of authority so don’t be handing out that title too often.

Set up an advertising account

This is the big one. Before you do this please be aware – the user interface for the Facebook Ads Manager is horrible and you will hate it. Even we struggle to use it.

Go to business.facebook.com > set up a business manager and set up an advertising account.

This is, unfortunately, a massive simplification of the process. Check out this more comprehensive guide from AdsEspresso.

We are not going to cover Facebook advertising strategies in this article but check out Facebook’s own creative tips for businesses and success stories to get an idea of how Facebook has benefitted businesses and how the advertising platform could benefit you.

Set up your Facebook Pixel + install it on your site

The Facebook Pixel is the key to advertising to audiences that have previously visited to your website. Once this pixel is in place you can begin generating remarketing audiences – Facebook will match the visitors to your website to their Facebook profiles (anonymously – no snooping) and you’ll be able to use Facebook’s advertising tools to target them. This can be pretty powerful as you can drive people from platforms where advertising is expensive, such as LinkedIn, to your website and then into your Facebook audiences, where advertising is generally more affordable.

Go to your Business Manager > go to Business Settings > go to Data Sources> go to Pixels and add a new one.

At that point, Facebook will give you a reasonably helpful guide to creating and implementing your pixel on your website. This pixel, a snippet of javascript which generates an extra cookie on your website, can be implemented in various ways depending on the platform. There are plugins, such as this one by AdsEspresso, which allow for a one-click implementation on a WordPress site. Other modern CMS, such as Squarespace, Bigcommerce and Shopify allow for one-click implementations natively. If your CMS is outdated, you may need to recruit a developer to help you manually implement the code.

Once your pixel is in place you can start generating remarketing audiences.

Go to Business Manager > Assets > Audiences > Create Audience > Custom Audience to get started.

Import your MailChimp list

If you’ve spent years building (GDPR compliant) email lists, then Facebook will allow you to match these details to their users too. Remember that segmentation – splitting your lists into buyers and prospects, for example, is an important way to get more value from Facebook Advertising. Go to Business Manager > Assets > Audiences > Create Audience > Custom Audience to get started. MailChimp has created their own guide to this (this tactic does apply to email lists with other services).

Check out your privacy settings

You now have a Facebook Page for your business. Do you want potential customers visiting your personal Facebook Profile and seeing everything you’ve ever posted? If not, then it’s time to do a privacy checkup. By changing the visibility of historic posts you can prevent any business risk from your past selves.

Go to Settings > Privacy to get started.

Don’t Expect Miracles

As we’ve detailed extensively – organic reach on Facebook (that is to say unpaid reach) is pretty much dead unless you have a large and active following around you. Facebook is a pay to play platform and while the Return On Investment can be excellent, investment is required. Expecting to change the fortunes of your business through Facebook without spending some money is quite frankly asking too much.

Conclusions

Facebook is an excellent platform for advertising. The Facebook Pixel allows you to remarket to people you’ve driven to your website on an app they probably use every day (in addition to Facebook you can advertise on Instagram, Facebook Messenger and Facebook’s Partner Network of websites). Facebook, however, is Pay to Play and is blighted by a terrible user interface.

Use this platform wisely and you might just be rewarded.

The post What to Do When You’ve Just Set Up A Facebook Page appeared first on Contact Online Ltd..