Your nonprofit’s website plays many roles. It educates supporters, guides beneficiaries to the programs they need, and helps raise money to support your cause. Additionally, it hosts all of the resources and materials you need to recruit and engage much-needed volunteers.

There are steps you can take to make your nonprofit’s website the best it can be, whether that’s enhancing accessibility or streamlining your volunteer application process. In this guide, we’ll cover the following design elements that can help you strengthen your volunteer program:

1. Navigable and Search Engine-Optimized Website
2. Streamlined Volunteer Experiences
3. Exclusive, Volunteer-Only Resources
4. Compelling Impact Updates

When supporters arrive on your website, it’s crucial that they’re met with a positive, user-friendly experience. To get started, we’ll discuss how you can do this by making your website easy to find and navigate.

1. Navigable and Search Engine-Optimized Website

Despite how important websites are to their success, nonprofits have an average website bounce rate of 60% to 70%. This represents the percentage of users who visit your site but don’t engage with any of your content or tools before leaving. Ideally, bounce rates should be 40% or less.

There are many factors that could cause a high bounce rate, such as long load times, poor user experience, low-quality content, and more. In most cases, however, enhancing your website’s navigation and optimizing your pages for search engines can dramatically improve bounce rates.

Here are some ways to step up sitewide navigation, enhance user experiences, and improve search engine visibility: Here are some ways to step up sitewide navigation, enhance user experiences, and improve search engine visibility:

• Revisit your menu. When you navigate to a website in search of specific information or pages, where do you look first? For most people, it’s the menu at the top of the page. Evaluate your website’s menu to ensure it is useful, relevant, and up-to-date. Does anything need to be changed or added to ensure prospective volunteers can easily find the right resources?
• ‍Build a hub for volunteer information. Next, check on the current state of your volunteer resources—are they organized and easy to find, or scattered across your site? Consider creating a centralized hub for these resources to help volunteers find the application, form, or opportunity they’re looking for. For example, the Volunteer page on the American Cancer Society’s website lists the various ways supporters can give their time, linking out to resources with more information.
• ‍Write relevant, optimized content. Quality content is the foundation of successful search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. Write about topics you are an expert in that your volunteers will want to read, optimizing SEO elements like titles, meta descriptions, and headings, and including relevant keywords. Remember that search engine algorithms are smarter than ever, and they pick up on perspective-driven content that is truly helpful to users.

To track your website’s performance and the impact of these changes, use a tool like Google Analytics. This makes it easy to see organic website traffic, which pages receive the most clicks, how long users stay on each page, the number of potential volunteers who convert, and more. Using this data, you can iterate and improve visitors’ experience with your website.

2. Streamlined Volunteer Experiences

Registering for your program is the first step an individual takes to becoming a dedicated volunteer for your cause. It’s imperative that you make the registration process a positive experience to set the tone for a long relationship with your new volunteer! From there, you’ll need to leverage your website and specialized volunteer management software to continue meeting their expectations.

Consider streamlining each part of the volunteer experience on your website:

• Registration: Make sure your application is as short as possible while still obtaining the necessary information. Additionally, the application should be easy to find on your website, comply with accessibility guidelines, and be mobile-friendly. To further streamline the process, consider automatically starting processes like securing background checks, sharing your activity waiver, or obtaining parental consent (if applicable).
• Onboarding: Consider creating a volunteer portal to host training modules, virtual Q&A sessions, educational resources, and more. This can organize what might otherwise be a messy process. Make sure next steps are always clear to limit confusion, and provide a staff member’s contact information in case volunteers have questions.
• Role or task assignments: Volunteers want to do work they are interested in and fulfilled by—it’s up to you to find these opportunities and inspire them to continue engaging. Create and link to resources that thoroughly describe available roles and their requirements or qualifications. You might also create a quiz that can point volunteers toward certain roles based on their interests.
• Scheduling: Scheduling can be a challenge for your staff and volunteers. Ideally, your volunteer management system should have scheduling tools that simplify event creation and allow you to share shift sign-ups. Consider adding a calendar to your website with upcoming opportunities so volunteers can plan ahead and register.

One of the most frustrating things that can happen to fired-up volunteers who are ready to learn or take action is being stopped in their tracks by a broken link or form. To prevent this—and quickly resolve issues that do happen—Cornershop Creative’s guide to website maintenance recommends creating a checklist and schedule for routine maintenance tasks.

3. Exclusive, Volunteer-Only Resources

Depending on the structure and size of your volunteer program, it may be beneficial to create a volunteer portal for volunteer-only resources. Volunteer-only resources can help communicate that you’re invested in your volunteers’ success and that you see them as part of your nonprofit’s team.

Plus, these resources can help your volunteers perform to the best of their abilities, reducing your team’s time spent on volunteer management.

Here are some resources you might choose to offer:

• Volunteer handbook: A volunteer handbook lists the policies and procedures that guide your volunteer program and can be a good reference for your volunteers. The handbook might include volunteer expectations, a code of conduct, safety guidelines, and details about processes like training and scheduling.

• Training materials: While it will be important to host some virtual or in-person training sessions with new volunteers, you can also put training materials on your website, like short readings, videos, and podcasts. Plus, your volunteers can turn to these materials if they ever need a refresher on the duties they’ve been trained in previously.

• Scheduling tool: Instead of manually scheduling your volunteers, you can set up a scheduling tool to do it for you. Have supporters self-select the days and times they want to volunteer.

• Community spaces: One of the greatest benefits of joining a volunteer program is getting to know other individuals who are passionate about the same cause. Empower your volunteers to build a community by offering forums in your volunteer portal. Keep the forums active by posting fun get-to-know-you questions and actively responding to posts.

• Volunteer directory: Depending on the nature of your volunteer program, it may be nice for volunteers to have access to each other’s contact information. Provide a short, easy-to-use directory with volunteers’ names, email addresses, and phone numbers. Ask permission before including an individual’s information in the directory or allow them to add the information themselves.

This is also a great place to educate volunteers on other ways to get involved or boost their impact. For example, 360MatchPro recommends spreading awareness of volunteer grants, which are corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs in which businesses donate monetary grants to the organizations their employees volunteer with often.

4. Compelling Impact Updates

Another great way to engage your community with your volunteer program is to share the impact your volunteers have on your cause. This illustrates to everyone involved in your work that you’re making progress on your mission and that your volunteers are important to that progress. By showing tangible proof of their impact, you’ll keep volunteers engaged and retain them as dedicated supporters for years to come.

Some of the factors that make for good impact updates and reports include:

• Strong, attractive visuals like graphics, images, and videos
• Interactive elements or reports, like this report from DigDeep
• Clear statistics relevant to your volunteer efforts
• Transparency and authenticity (e.g., include details about both success and failures or setbacks and how you overcame them)
• A prominent place on your website

Encourage your volunteers and others to share your impact stories by adding social sharing tools to your website. This way, when website visitors see an image or read a story that resonates with them, they can easily share it with their personal network. This will help drive more awareness for your cause and recruit more volunteers to your program!

If you’re looking for a way to more effectively engage your nonprofit’s volunteers, optimizing your website is a great starting point. As you incorporate these four tips into your optimization plan, remember to think like your volunteers and consider your website from their perspective!

To take your website optimization efforts to the next level, consider working with a nonprofit web design agency that can help you fine-tune the look and functionality of your website so that it’s a great resource for your volunteers and the rest of your community.

With 15 years’ experience, Ira is an expert in nonprofit online communications and online fundraising. His work has resulted in increased funds and resounding supporter engagement for hundreds of organizations.

Ira oversees our project management team and works with clients to provide our clients with the best possible final product. He also manages all of our strategic engagements and helps guide nonprofits to determine their long-term strategy goals for online communications.