Websites have become one of the most important elements of an organization’s external image. When someone wants to know about what you do or who you are, they go directly to your website.

But did you know that most visitors make a decision about your organization’s website within 10 to 15 seconds? Based on their first impression, they will quickly choose to either stay on your site and explore, or move on to another organization instead. The same is true of your Facebook Page.

This means that you must grab their attention and communicate who you are with just a few words and images. You want to make it easy to navigate throughout your site, so that your different constituents can quickly find the information they need. And you should make your calls to action jump out, because most engaged visitors will still spend no more than 2-3 minutes visiting a website and you want them to take some sort of action before they leave.

Your visitor will form their impression of your organization based on a combination of tone, images, colors, and a few key messages they assimilated during their short visit. You want to make sure that they come away with the right impression, and give them a reason to return so that you can begin to build a relationship.

We recommend several steps to strengthen your online presence:

1. Ensure that your website and social media platforms are up-to-date, consistently branded, and easy to navigate.

2. Develop a clear communication plan complete with core messages, message sequencing and campaigns, that includes your entire online media mix.

3. Integrate your technologies to make them easier to manage and seamless for the visitor interacting with your organization online. For example, you can stream dynamic content from your website to your Facebook and Twitter accounts, without having to even log in. You can embed videos from your YouTube channel so that visitors view them without having to leave your website or Facebook Page. You can also integrate website comments with your Facebook Page to increase interactivity, use content from your website to build your e-newsletter, and allow visitors to become Facebook fans directly from your website.

4. Create benchmarks and use monitoring and evaluation tools like Google Analytics, social media management tools and analytics from your email blasts, to learn from your constituents and strengthen your messaging and calls to action to maximize your impact.

Upleaf can help your organization build an online strategy tailored to your constituents, your institutional objectives, and your budget, and roll out all of the steps above.

We invite you to learn more about Upleaf and contact us if you’re interested in receiving a quote for our work.