How to Leverage Your School's Website to Support Fundraising

Use our best practices to turn your website into a powerful fundraising tool.

Your school relies on donations to power extracurricular opportunities, educational resources, scholarships, and more. However, fundraising for your school year-round comes with challenges, from effectively getting the word out about your events and campaigns to facilitating a smooth donation process online. How can your school maximize its fundraising efforts while reducing your administrative burden?

Luckily, there's a clear answer to your problem, and best of all, you probably already have it in your tech stack: your school website! Use your website to back your fundraisers, from marketing your campaigns online to processing donations securely. By revamping your content strategy and web design, you can harness the full potential of your digital presence and reach your fundraising goals.

Use these best practices to shape your website into a powerful fundraising tool:

• Create a strong event landing page
• Streamline your donation form
• Generate quality blog content

If you're new to web design or looking to streamline your web content strategy, leverage a content management system (CMS) designed specifically for schools. Morweb's guide to school website builders recommends investing in a solution that offers drag-and-drop functionality, built-in accessibility tools, and customizable layouts to build engaging web pages and quickly spotlight your fundraisers. Backed by the correct CMS, you'll be in great shape to support your fundraising strategy. Let's begin!

Create a strong event landing page on your school website

Picture this: a fantastic school auction will raise money for your extracurricular programs. You've set up an event committee, procured the right items, and developed your program agenda. It's time to market your event to get your entire school's community excited and eager to participate.

A strong event landing page on your website can help boost participation. An event landing page is a one-stop shop for everything your school's community needs to know about your upcoming fundraiser, allowing you to generate excitement and drive donations and registrations.

Specifically, your event landing page should cover the following:

• Date and time of your fundraising event
• The purpose of the fundraiser, including your fundraising goal and who the fundraiser will benefit
• High-impact visuals to encourage giving, such as photos of your student basketball team if you're hosting a sports fundraiser
• Any exciting perks, like live entertainment from your school's band or one-on-one time with the principal
• Gamification features, like a fundraising thermometer or event countdown
• Registration process and fee (if applicable) for your event
• Instructions on how to get involved, from donating to volunteering to sharing your landing page with friends and family members on social media

You should also embed a donation form into your event landing page with the help of your website builder. This way, your audience won't have to navigate to an external resource to donate, which can slow down the giving process and potentially cause supporters to abandon this critical action altogether. By making the giving process as easy as possible, you'll be more likely to drive impressive results and realize your fundraising goals.

Streamline your school website's donation form

When your giving form is straightforward and easily accessible, you can increase the likelihood of donors submitting gifts. Here are our top recommendations to simplify the donation experience and develop a well-designed donation page:

• Limit the number of prompts: Imagine you're a prospective donor who lands on a donation form. You fill out some information thinking you're done with the donation process, only to scroll down and see an endless list of even more prompts. Frustrated, you click off the donation page and forget about donating. To avoid this issue, only ask for essential information, including name, contact information, billing amount, and billing information.
• Offer giving flexibility: Allow supporters to give using multiple payment methods, including credit card, debit card, and ACH deposit. In addition to allowing donors to submit one-time gifts, you should create an option for monthly giving. Bloomerang's guide to donation pages recommends describing your monthly giving program and explaining its impact so you can encourage recurring giving. For example, you might explain how your monthly giving program provides extra funds directly to students' academic resources in case unexpected difficulties arise, like computers not working in your library.
• Create a clear call to action: Create urgency around donating by designing a call to action to give at the top of your donation form. For example, you might write "Give Today to Secure Bright Futures for Our Students" or "Donate Now to Enrich Our Students' Academic Experiences." These calls to action remind community members about the importance of their gifts and motivate donors to complete the donation process.
• Make it mobile-friendly: With people spending more time on their phones than ever, you must optimize your donation page for mobile devices. Your donation form should automatically resize to fit all screen sizes, and all buttons and prompts should be clickable from a phone. With the help of your website builder, you can leverage mobile-optimized website templates and comprehensive form builders to automatically streamline your donation page (and all web pages) for mobile users.

Once your donation page is in tip-top shape, share it widely with your school's community members. For example, you can link to it in your email newsletter, add the link to your social media bios, and even include a QR code to your donation form within your direct mailings, which will help direct more traffic to your donation page so you can drive conversions.

Generate quality blog content on your school website

Blog content can be a great way to promote your fundraisers and explain your needs to the community. Plus, compelling posts can help drive necessary actions, like encouraging parents to sign up to volunteer at your next fundraising event, join a peer-to-peer fundraiser, or donate. Use these best practices to maximize the effectiveness of your blog:

• Be creative with your content: Don't just post one-paragraph entries about your school's dire need for funds to send your robotics team to its next competition. Instead, make your content more engaging by sharing a variety of different types of blog posts. Continuing with the same example, you might ask a robotics team member to write a brief essay about why they're looking forward to attending the competition or ask a staff member to create a post about the robotics team's past successes at competitions. You can even repurpose a video of your robotics team presenting during their last competition into a transcript on your blog. The more exciting and varied your content is, the greater the chance community members will engage with your posts and be more likely to take action!
• Add links to your desired subsequent actions: After community members read your blog and feel inspired, they'll likely want to take action. However, they might click away from your website if they can't quickly find out how to do so. Link to your donation page in your blog posts and other relevant resources like your event landing page to support simple navigation.
• Stick to a consistent posting schedule: Your blog is a great engagement tool to keep your audience in your school at all times so you can leverage their support for your campaigns, events, and more. Regularly post on your blog to keep it fresh and promote the most up-to-date information.

Remember that the top school, association, and nonprofit websites take their blogs to the next level by including visuals, so include various visual elements like photos, videos, and graphics to break up longer posts and draw your audience's eye.

Wrapping Up

By coupling your fundraising strategy with a robust school website design, you'll be well-prepared to encourage giving and create a positive online donation experience. Track relevant metrics like bounce and conversion rates as you revamp your website. This way, you can adjust your content strategies to optimize your success.

Author Bio

Murad Bushnaq is the Founder and CEO of Morweb. Since its inception in 2014, Murad has acted as Creative Director and Chief Technologist to help nonprofits spread their vision online through engaging design, intuitive software, and strategic communication.