Nonprofit Expressions

About Website Report Cards: Our report cards are for website owners who want to improve their sites. We look at websites and formulate our report cards by evaluating four main criteria: first impressions, usability, search engine optimization and technical standards.

Learn about how we decided on our criteria, and get a more complete definition the 4 categories.

Website: http://www.NewChurches.com

1. First Impressions

The look & feel of this website doesn’t need a lot of work. In fact, I don’t think it needs any at all. Upon first glance I am stunned by its beauty! The natural colors, web 2.0 feel and images draw me in to want more.

Upon a closer look, I find an equally attractive interior. It consistently brands the “for new churches” logo, uses repetition in colors and layout, as well as menu bar.

Pleasing to the eye: A +
Proximity: A
Alignment: A +
Repetition: A +
Contrast: A -
Reflection of branding and purpose: A +

GRADE: A
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2. Usability

The usability is fairly simple. The main menu stays consistent and is conventional with modern website formats. The home page includes a second menu on the top left that gives users another opportunity to engage themselves in the content of the site.

The purpose of the site is obvious by its name (”for new churches”), however, when looking for an “About Us” page I noted that this page either does not exist, or is too difficult to find. The closest thing I found was the “Getting Started” page which includes a video from one of its founders that gives you a quick overview of the purpose and navigation of the tools on the site. This is helpful, but not all users are going to have the capability or desire to watch this video.

The site is chock full of free resources, downloads, blogs and directories that are all very helpful. When I searched for some sort of newsletter subscription or contact us form, I found neither. I had to do some digging to find a place to subscribe to “Ed’s picks.”

User’s ability to understand, comprehend and interact with the website: A
User’s frustration or anxiety associated with the website: B
User’s ability to find the site’s main purpose upon first glance: A -
Consistent Navigation: A +
Easy Navigation: A +
Navigation visibility: A +
Website accomplishes functional goals: A -
Use of applications: A
Newsletter Signup: C

GRADE: B
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3. Search Engine Optimization

Although initially the layout of this site appears to be non-search engine friendly, with its lack of text, the first thing we noticed was its 4/10 page rank. This is excellent considering most websites only rank 2/10 - are rarely get over a 6! Then when we popped the hood and looked at the code we mostly liked what we saw. The menu’s are unordered lists with heavy styling (a great way to go for SEO). The only initial problem we saw was the lack of h1 tags near the top of the pages. The title tags have many keywords to be desired, but are not set to default.

The Meta tags are outright missing. This is kind of a sad mistake because they are so easy to include, and they do help when the search engines want a description of the page. The clean URL strings are beautiful though. Its quite impressive to see no file names at the end of the URL strings. This tells us they are probably using Ruby on Rails for the site development. (I love it!)

Title tags: C
Meta tags: F
Clean URLs: A +
Semantic information design: A
Descriptive anchor tags: A
Google’s Page Rank: B

GRADE: C +
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4. Technical Standards

The first thing to notice about the code under the hood is the Doctype. XHTML 1.0 Strict. This alone points toward good coding practices. Once we ran it through the valiator at: http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.newchurches.com%2F we find there are 14 errors. This is alarming at first but almost every error relates to the use of an ‘&’ symbol. This is not perfect, but forgivable. We have to remember most sites do not live up to these standards.

When we ran an accessibility check we found no problems. My only complaint is that the code is very hard to read. It has comments, but it looks like it was generated by a program and placed together as opposed to hand written.

Doc type declaration: A +
HTML or XHTML standards compliant: B
CSS standards compliant: B
Accessibility standards compliant: A
Well formed code: B +

GRADE: B +
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FINAL GRADE: Passing (This site is definitely not stuck in the 90’s, and is living on the edge of cutting).
For a free report card on your website, please contact info@nonprofit-expressions.com

Website Report Cards
(for website owners)

Have you ever gone to a website and said “I wish my website looked like this!”

What is it about a website that either draws you in, or makes want to click the “back” button? There are no black and white rules of web design. Everyone has a different opinion on style, a different method of navigating, and a different level of web experience.

But the fact is that there is some criteria that the majority of the World Wide Web can agree makes a website “bad” or “good.”

In our experience doing website re-designs (taking an old site and making it better) it is important that you (as a website owner) know what to look for in your website, and know what to ask your web designer! We have decided that a report card method would be the most helpful.

How we decided on the criteria:

1. First Impressions
Is the website pleasing the the eye? While this is the most subjective of the four criteria, based on our own experience and expertise, there IS such a thing as bad design,

In design school they teach us that there are four basic principals of good design. They include: proximity, alignment, repetition and contrast.

Another question to ask is: Do the colors and images reflect the organization’s branding and purpose?

2. Usability
In grading usability, we follow the concepts set out by people like Steve Krug (web usability consultant whose clients include Apple, AOL, Netscape and many others). Usability is the visitor’s ability to understand, comprehend and interact with the website without frustration or anxiety.

Can you tell what the site’s main purpose is upon first glances? Most websites only have 3 seconds to introduce themselves to a visitor before they click the “back” button.

Is the navigation consistent, easy to understand and highly visible? Is the information flow in such a way that you can find what you are looking for without having to think about it? Does the website accomplish its goal in a functional way? Do the applications work? Is there a newsletter, and is it easy to sign up for?

3. Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing the amount of traffic a website gets from search engines by using targeted key words.

Does the site have title tags, meta tags, and clean URLs? Does it have semantic information design (such as an h2 tag following an h1 tag)? Does it have descriptive anchor tags?

Although there are only a handful of questions here, SEO is actually a very complex topic that we could talk about for hours. These, however, are the criteria that we are placing in our report cards.

4. Technical Standards
The technical standards are not subjective criteria. These are critical elements used by software engineers in the technical community even beyond the scope of web design.

Does the website have doc type declaration? Is it HTML or XHTML standards compliant? CSS standards compliant? Accessibility standards compliant?

And last, does it have well formed code?
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Now that you understanding our criteria, let me explain our grading methods. First, each of the four criteria will be a separate grade in of itself - like a report card from grade school! Each subject gets its own grade.

Second, we will give the website a pass or failing overall grade. This will tell you if it is still stuck in kindergarten, or has graduated to go to college! (Is it stuck in code from the 90s, or is it up to Web 2.0 standards).

So stay tuned for our Website Report Cards. Our first grade will be given to NewChurches.com.

For a free report card on your website, please contact info@nonprofit-expressions.com

By Jennifer

Forget the lead paragraph, watch our ‘Elf Yourself’ video. (A Christmas treat from Nonprofit Expressions).

Office Max gives internet consumers the “miraculous ability to turn themselves into elfs,” according to the www.elfyourself.com website. The program lets you upload up to four pictures of your friend’s faces. The result? A hilarious video of your friends, coworkers, boss or family members that you can share with them!

So let’s get to the point: what makes it a viral ad, and why is it so effective?

Wikipedia defines viral marketing and viral advertising as “marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness, through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses. It can be word-of-mouth delivered or enhanced by the network effects of the Internet. Viral marketing is a marketing phenomenon that facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message voluntarily.”

According to George Silverman in ‘The Secrets of Word of Mouth Marketing,’ a satisfied customer may tell an average of three people about a product/service that they like, but ELEVEN people about a product or service which they didn’t like. In the case of Elf Yourself, however, people may tell 4 ore more people every time they make a video - multiply that by the number of videos each person makes (I made 5 versions for family and friends).

Other well-known viral ad campaigns include the Aqua Teen Hunger Force campaign which caused a bomb scare in Boston. Although this was not an internet campaign, it obviously created a lot of brand awareness. Other types of viral promotions include funny video clips, interactive online games called “advergames” or text messages, for a few examples.

Viral Marketing as Cause Marketing

Let’s think about viral marketing in nonprofit terms. We don’t necessarily have a product or service, but we do have a cause. If a viral ad for a specific cause is self-replicating, that means that a user is feeling connected to a cause or purpose. They start to have a feeling of ownership with the cause. TheNewJew blog talks more about maximizing social networking tools.

For more information contact the author.

In 2006, Compassion By Design was brought into existence to equip church leaders with the best tools to lead their congregations deeper into ministries of compassion. “As modern American Christians we tend to see the mission field as primarily international, while our unsaved neighbors are desperate for the love of Christ,” said David Mills, founder, Compassion by Design. 

To bridge that gap on a practical level Compassion By Design offers a Needs Assessment Kit which allows leaders to connect their community’s needs with their congregation’s gifts and abilities. Founder David Mills summed up the purpose of Compassion By Design: “Helping ministries find effective ways to serve their communities.”

Another Compassion By Design service began as a way to meet a need in the faith community. Mills saw a lack of government and grant aids being secured by churches and faith-based nonprofits. His response was to use his personal grant writing expertise to pass along the skills to others in conferences and training sessions.

How Nonprofit Expressions is Using Technology to Help

Nonprofit Expressions was able to take Mills’ ideas and vision and incorporate them into the Compassion By Design website. The site needed to have a crisp, attractive feel that quickly directs visitors to the right information. The initial marketing strategy of the site is opt-in email campaigns. Mills also blogs regularly which Nonprofit Expressions made available through Wordpress.

The next step in effectively marketing Compassion By Design was the addition of e-commerce, using the OS Commerce Solutions package (an open source application available online). Podcasting software is installed and are coming soon! The website design is easily read by search engine spiders because everything, down to the tabs at the top, is CSS based. The site is coded in XHTML 1.0 transitional and CSS 1.0. The site is also Secure Socket Layer capable for secure credit card transactions.

The New Concept

Currently, the entire website is in a state of transition as we are implementing AJAX type technologies to give the site a Web 2.0 interface and a highly user friendly information structure. When we re-envisioned website we wanted to take the process a church leader goes through in the Compassion by Design system and make it very easy to understand.

Our most important goal in the process was to make sure a new visitor and potential client can understand the grander scheme of why Compassion By Design’s system is a new, smart way to both plant churches and increase an existing churches impact in the community. We want the new site to have the “fresh” and “polished” look essential to the web 2.0 transition the web is making. Behind this new look is a new array of technologies that will make diverse information easier to connect and digest, while giving the visitor an experience that looks and feels very simple.

The site has many surprises in store for the new year on the site re-launch date of January 1, 2008. The new feature list will include a collaborative community network enabling teams to work in unison via file and document sharing, communication tools, and members only restricted areas all tying into the existing email marketing and ecommerce software. We are proud to be helping Compassion By Design bridge the web 2.0 gap and step into the forefront of the web revolution in information sharing and ownership.

Look for the new and improved Compassion by Design Website and Internet community on January 1st at: www.compassionbydesign.org