Charities and Fundraising

Charity Fund Raising

Purepages works with several UK charities to help them raise funds, primarily using the Internet in some way.  There are, however, several methodologies that can be used and are summarised below:

Link available at http://asbah.purestores.com

Although, as illustrated above, there are a myriad of ways to fundraise using the Internet,  for most charities their website will be the most obvious and number one consideration. Sadly, however, this is a marketing tool that largely under performs for them, and for no really good reason.  The most common stock answer given by charities when told that their site is pretty dire (as most are) is that there is a lack of funds. Lack of funds, however, should not equal lack of imagination. Given a reasonable age span of supporters, there will be many capable sub-thirty year olds within the supporter base who can produce, with the aid of one of the many design packages around on the market, something quite acceptable.  And what are the four primary characteristics that make so many charity sites poor?

1. No clarity of communication or message: What does the charity really do and how is the money spent
2. Poor design: the site is a ‘hotchpotch’ of thoughts and aspirations usually cobbled up by the ‘committee’
3. Too much Information crammed onto the home page: Often the many disparate departments within a charity fight and squabble over homepage pixels.
4. Illogical navigation and user inter-operability

The following diagram shows the spectrum of charity giving from asking on the left hand side

• brochure ware websites
• email donation requests
• PR / news (such as the DEC Haiti Appeal)

To the earning aspects of the right hand side

• electronic shops
• pay per click or click through scenarios

And to float an idea to you……Our virtual balloon race is great fun and can raise lots of dosh for any UK charity.

For a revolutionary twist on the old favourite of fundraising, have a close look at Rentaballoonrace.com (RABR for short).

Our aim is to provide a fun and environmentally friendly way for your organisation or good cause to raise money in a fun and unique way. There are two packages to choose from, with one aimed at smaller groups and one aimed at corporate clients. Once you have decided which package is best suited for your group or company the only other decision you need to make is to decide which city to launch your race from! We currently have London, Edinburgh, Rome and Paris in our database but we are adding new cities each week. Or if there is a city or town you would specifically like maybe we can add that too!

Web design is only one area of Purepages’ expertise. We have a large portfolio of sites mainly in the charity and car sales areas. We strive to use open source languages where we can such as HTML and PHP and make sure all our websites are wholly W3C compatible. We appreciate that the key features of user friendly websites are good quality images which help explain the emphasis of the website. And secondly clear, to the point, text which explains to the user what the website is about.

We aim not to use software such as Adobe Flash as we feel this is lazy programming and rarely enhances the user’s experience on the website and in some cases can actually cause more problems than it solves. Our test bed of software and hardware means we test on all modern operating systems including Windows 7, Mac OS and linux. We test in the most common internet browsers to ensure (where possible) any visitor to your site will see the same thing no matter where they are in the world. Given the rise in smartphones we also make sure our sites work in those as well. Given the patchy support for flash across various smartphones this is another reason we tend not to use it widely in our sites.

We would love you to get in touch with us!