Blogs can serve a lot of purposes—I hope to bring you good information that you may not get the chance to see during your busy day.

I hope we'll engage in a conversation, and that you'll bring information to light that I and others haven't seen.

I invite you to contribute to the conversation through the comment section or by emailing me at kenristine@hotmail.com

My first entry will share one of my pet peeves….that organizations fail to understand the impact of their web sites. I admit, if we were in Kansas City this might not be a big deal. But in the Northwest, along with Silicon Valley and a handful of other areas, the Internet is a big deal.

Thanks to another blog, Don't tell the Donor, I learned of research conducted for The Nonprofit Times regarding mail solicitation and the Internet. A survey of 1,000 people asked "When you receive a mail solicitation from a charity, which of the following places on the Internet do you look at before deciding whether to give money?"

The survey was run in 2005 and repeated again in 2008 by the NonProfit Times. According to the 2005 survey, 25% of respondents said they looked up some sort of information. In 2008 that figure grew to 44%.

I am puzzled. Those numbers don't square with the response rates you see from large mail campaigns. A response rate of 5% is pretty good for a targeted direct mail. To even have 44% of direct mail envelopes opened amazes me…let alone saying that 44% of these people took time to find more information about the organization.

But put aside those numbers. There is a deeper lesson here than nitpicking the numbers. What you should be aware of is where people go for their information about your organization before they make a decision to give.

If you read the NonProfit Times article or the Don't Tell the Donor blog you may get a sense that your web site is less important than it was.

But a closer look tells a different story. First, your web site is one source of information that you control. Make sure that it is up to date and that it tells a compelling story. Review your web site at least once a year. Recruit a few friends who don’t know a lot about your organization. Ask them to visit your web site. How does the site strike them? Is it easy to understand? Ask them to look at a piece of your usual mail solicitation, and then go to the web site. Does your site answer their questions? Does it give them a way to email a real person for an answer?

But most important, ask them if it motivates them to give. 

Remember, a visitor to your web site may have heard something about you from a friend or seen a bus sign for your organization. If they go to your web site will they feel they know more about your organization after their visit?

Finally, as a grant maker, I often use web sites to find basic contact information. While there are privacy issues, every site ought to at least provide an email address for the executive director's email and development director...even if the address is executivedirector@abc.org. And if you set up an email account in that name, make sure someone checks it.

There's an old saying "You only have one chance to make a first impression."  Most of the time your organization is making a first impression on potential supporters in ways and at times that you are not even aware of.