Concentrating on what a website does, not what it looks like #DigitalLab
Concentrating on what a website does, not what it looks like #DigitalLab
Anjelica Cleaver, Marketing and Development, Tomorrow’s Warriors experiments with what makes a website work and also explores the best messaging for a crowdfunding campaign. Part of her Fellowship at Digital Lab.
Blog 1: Concentrate on what the website does, not what it looks like
Digital Lab has come at a really useful time for me and my organisation because we are doing a redesign of our website. I have been able to discuss with my mentor Tom Bearshaw how as an organisation we can develop our digital strategy and make our website fit for purpose.
One thing that I’ve learnt is that each webpage needs to have one purpose and that the design of that page needs to drive the user towards that purpose. For example, if the purpose of that page is to get people to click on a link then there shouldn’t be too much text to draw away attention, and the link should be clear and obvious.
This advice has been very useful in changing the way I was approaching website design. My initial focus would have been in shaping a narrative through the website which captures the company values, in having in-depth descriptions of everything the company does, and in making sure the look of the website was right.
I’m now trying to remember that the most important thing is not what the website looks like, but what the website does.
In creating a digital strategy for a new website, another important learning point has been that the purpose of each page should be easily measurable through analytics, and there should be a way to capture that data. For example, if the purpose of the page was to get someone to click on the link at the end, you could measure the success of the page by how many people who visited the page clicked on the link. If the page was very text heavy with important information and the use of the page was to get people to read that information, then you could measure how long the average user stayed on the webpage to measure its success.
Once you have assessed what you are measuring and how you can measure it and captured that data, you can see which web pages might be failing in their purpose, and they can be edited later on. This can help improve a website in the long-term and inform a digital strategy. This could prove especially useful for larger digital campaigns.
Blog 2: #IAmWarrior Crowdfunding
We are currently running an #IAmWarrior crowdfunding campaign to raise £100,000 for our charity over the year. We had a similar successful campaign in 2018-19 that exceeded its target in 9 months, raising £120,000. However, due to shifts in the company’s economic model, we need to start fundraising £100,000 every year in order to fund our Young Artist Development Programme. As such, we will need to do two things with our digital strategy:
- we need to develop retargeting campaigns that will allow our past supporters to see our new appeals and encourage them to donate again;
- we also need to reach new audiences who support similar causes.
One way that we can target our regular audience through Facebook Ads is by adding a Facebook Pixel to our website. This allows us to advertise to anyone who has been on our website. This information can be very useful for retargeting campaigns, as we will be asking those who have given a one-off donation to us to become regular donors on our new Friends scheme, which we intent to launch in 2021.
We can use Facebook lookalike audiences in targeted paid campaigns to reach new people who would likely support our cause. An experiment would be to contrast a Facebook lookalike audience with who we could predict our target market would be. If the Facebook lookalike audiences were effective this could massively inform the company’s digital strategy. It would also change the messaging.
The company is well known to a small audience as it is at the forefront of UK jazz. However, it has as a primary goal to increase diversity in the music scene and to achieve equality for black people, women and those in challenging socio-economic situations. It supports young people in achieving their dreams to become musicians. It also achieves artistic excellence and is a leader in the cultural sector.
These messages have universal appeals, and if we started to find that we were attracting more new donors who hadn’t heard of our organisation, we could change the organisation’s messaging to be more open and universal.
Anjelica Cleaver, Marketing and Development, Tomorrow’s Warriors
Anjelica Cleaver is Marketing and Development Coordinator at pioneering artist development charity Tomorrow’s Warriors. As well as doing freelance marketing, videography and content creation for clients such as Black Women in Theatre, she is also a freelance writer for publications like EZH and a radio host and producer for stations including Soho Radio and Balamii.