173 – Is Your Volunteer Website Turning People Away?

July 31, 2025

Episode #173: Is Your Volunteer Website Turning People Away? 

In this episode of the Volunteer Nation Podcast, Tobi Johnson shares valuable insights on how nonprofits can improve volunteer websites to attract and engage more volunteers effectively. Addressing common issues such as unclear value propositions, excessive choice options, stock imagery, and poor mobile experiences, Tobi discusses practical strategies to create a compelling and user-friendly volunteer hub.  

She emphasizes the importance of clear calls to action, authentic visuals, social proof, and urgency to convert visitors into active volunteers. With actionable tips and a focus on modern user behavior, this episode serves as a comprehensive guide to optimizing nonprofit websites for better volunteer recruitment! 

Volunteer Website – Episode Highlights

• [01:04] – The Importance of Volunteer Websites 
• [02:42] – Adapting to Modern Content Consumption 
• [04:33] – Creating Effective Volunteer Hub Pages 
• [09:14] – Common Issues with Volunteer Websites 
• [15:52] – Improving Volunteer Website Conversions 
• [26:21] – Social Proof and Trust Signals 
• [28:59] – Creating Urgency and Clear Navigation 
• [34:13] – Ensuring a Good User Experience 
• [39:41] – Final Tips 

Volunteer Website – Quotes from the Episode

“If the site doesn’t quickly communicate what’s in it for the visitor, visitors bounce in seconds. If they’re not seeing an immediate reason to continue to read, they’re going to bounce. So, that’s the number one. Unclear or weak value proposition, not what is your mission, but what’s in it for the visitor.” 

“When we’re marketing, things are changing rapidly in the world. People are not going to spend a lot of time reading. I hate to say it, but they’re not. So, we’ve got to have very simple websites that get people to take action and start taking one simple step.” 

 

Helpful Links

• Volunteer Management Progress Report  
• VolunteerPro Impact Lab 
• Google Analytics 
• Hotjar 
• ScoreApp 
• Volunteer Nation Episode #5: 8 Ways Your Nonprofit Website is Failing to Attract Volunteers  
• Volunteer Nation Episode #59 – 6 Must Have Strategies to Recruit Volunteers Using Your Website 
• Volunteer Nation Episode #20: How to Design Irresistible Online Volunteer Opportunities 

Contact Us

Have questions or suggestions for the show? Email us at wecare@volpro.net.

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Episode #173 Transcript: Is Your Volunteer Website Turning People Away? 

Tobi: Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Volunteer Nation Podcast. I’m your host, Tobi Johnson, and I am hoping that I can make it through this podcast without coughing anybody out there have. A summer cold that just won’t go away. I’ve got one of those, for those of you in the southern hemisphere, maybe it’s a fall cold that hasn’t gone away. I don’t know.  

There’s something going around right now, so my throat’s a little croaky. I might start coughing, but I’ll hit pause, or my editors will edit it out. Thank you. Editing team. So today I want to talk about your volunteer website. I hate to say it y’all, but this is an area we need to improve. It is so crucial to attracting and converting volunteers, to improving your signups, to making sure your recruitment is successful. 

We spend a lot of time posting if we are posting on other websites that like Volunteer Match or Idealist and some of the other volunteer management software you might use. But your own volunteer website or what I like to call volunteer hub pages, which are sort of a website within a website, so your organization has a website, but then you have pages where you’re talking about volunteerism within that website. 

That website absolutely needs updating. I’m almost a hundred percent sure, and the reason I know this is because times have changed and I’ve looked at a fair amount of. Volunteer websites lately, uh, during my comms audits, when I’m working with clients on their volunteer recruitment strategy, I’ve also in the membership community, sometimes we look at folks’ websites and there’s a lot of improvement that needs to happen because people have changed. 

I was just talking with someone today about our blog posts. We’re just about to go through a big refresh of all our blog posts and articles on our Volunteer Pro website. And I was talking about what our blog posts used to look like when I first started writing, which was about 10 years ago. 

And back then the long form blog post, the blog post that just read is continuous text was absolutely the way people wrote blog post. Then they were stories. They were personal. They were business related. Ours were business related, and they did sometimes include bulleted lists and images and whatnot. 

But what blog posts look like 10 years ago and what they look like now are completely different. And the way people read blog posts, you think about 10 years ago. We weren’t relying so much on social media or our smartphones. We were still often using our computers, laptops, desktops, et cetera. So, we had a bigger screen to look at. 

And nowadays people have been looking at our content on their small screens, on their phones. The other thing that’s really happened is people are expecting speedy answers. If you think about generative ai, if you do a Google search, there’s an AI result. People are going to chat GPT now over Google sometimes to find information. 

And so, the expectation of your prospective volunteers is that they’re going to get an answer right away and, and they have specific questions that they want answered if they’re interested in a volunteer opportunity. So I want to talk today a little bit about how to make improvements. The other thing is people are busy and there is a lot of information that is overwhelming our brains, and so. 

Folks will quickly, you think we’re in a swipe culture now? People aren’t immediately entertained or find value in what they’re looking at. They’re going to swipe away or they’re going to click away like right away. And so, we have even less time to make a good first impression. So, volunteer recruitment in our past and nine out of our 10 past volunteer management progress report surveys, volunteer recruitment was the top challenge. And so, I want to talk a lot in the coming weeks about volunteer recruitment and how to improve. Because if we keep looking to our own websites within our own sector for inspiration, we’re going to keep doing what’s not best practice. 

I was just finishing slides for a seminar I’m doing with our volunteer Pro impact lab members on how to create and improve conversions on their websites if you’re interested. So, I was working on slides for our course seminar. It’s called Turn Visitors into Volunteers Craft Webpages that Inspire Action. 

I’m going to be walking our members through how to build wire frames or content maps so that you can work with your comms department. Because often when I start talking about websites, people go, well, I’m not the web designer. Yes, but you are the expert in volunteer recruitment. You know a lot more about volunteer recruitment than your web designer does. 

I wanted to equip our members with information so that they can. Not only have a conversation about how to improve the website, but also to map it out and to have a better collaboration with their communications team or their web designer. And so, if you want to check that out, you can get the replay and the handouts and everything just by joining us inside the Impact Lab. 

If you go to volpro.net/join, you can learn more about all the things we do in the Impact Lab, but we try to really focus on what’s working now and really helping people stay abreast of the things that they need to think about as leaders of volunteers. But let’s get back to websites. 

So, your volunteer website, or you might call it your Get Involved pages, or your volunteer now pages, these are. Part of your most valuable tools to engage your community, you own them. They’re not social media where people can change algorithms. Now, yes, there are algorithms that drive people to your website like Google or Bing, but you also are sending people to your website through your flyers, through links from other websites. 

There are different ways people get, or people are just researching online, and they want to find you. So, it is your front door to your community. It’s where people are sent when they search. Yes, but it’s also where you’re referring people to get more information about volunteering. So, volunteer posting, volunteer opportunities on their own is not going to be enough. 

Your website is the place that people, that you build credibility and educate people about what you do. It makes sense that these are designed purposefully. And if it hasn’t been redesigned lately and you haven’t given it a hard look, now’s the time. A well-built page has the power to spark action and convert browsers into inquirers and inquirers into joiners, but it must be designed to do so. 

A website is not an online brochure. It’s something that should be interactive, but unfortunately what I’m seeing out there lately is that web pages are poorly designed. Or they don’t inspire action. And so, we’re going to talk about that a little bit. Luckily, your nonprofit can use best practices in online marketing without spending a lot of extra money or time. 

So, in today’s episode, I’m going to break down. Exactly what’s working for today’s websites. I’ll cover what you should include on your pages to create an exceptional user experience that boosts con conversions and helps grow. The number of volunteer applicants you get each month. 

The more visitors that come to your pages and stay on your pages, the more you will rank in Google, the higher you will rank in Google. That’s one of the ways Google an analyzes. Whether or not it should send people to your webpage. So, your volunteer recruitment pages or landing pages or what I like to call hub pages. 

I’ve been teaching inside in our courses when we talk about volunteer recruitment specific to volunteer web pages. I often will, I’ll show people that, how to lay out a page, a series of pages so that Google can map it correctly and can index it correctly, and so that it shows that there’s something there that it wants to point to. 

But you know, it’s one of the most important online tools you have at your disposal. Now, you may again not be the marketing person. You might refer the marketing person to this or your web designer, to this podcast episode. And if you’re listening from the marcoms department, welcome. But it’s one of your key digital marketing channels. 

It’s if not your most important, I think it is your most important. It’s also a place, your website is a place where you can build a list of contacts who are interested in your opportunities, so you can start to capture leads via lead magnets or via downloads, or having people sign up for calls with you or info sessions. 

There’s lots of ways where you can start to build a following of. Folks that are interested in who you are that you’re communicating with and nurturing through email communication. We find that the combination of our website and email communication is one of our most powerful set of tools when it comes to reaching the public. 

And we have thousands of people that come to our webpage, particularly our volunteer Pro page every month. And so, I’ve been looking at our data and realizing that not everybody’s taking advantage of the. The offers that we have that could help them improve their volunteer engagement, our volunteer Pro Impact Lab, our Volunteer Pro Volunteer Management Fundamentals course, and some other things that folks that could really help nonprofits. 

And so, I see that we’re having a lot of people visit the website, but sometimes they’re not converting into customers. And so, you can also see whether that’s happening for you. How do you know whether you know the title of this blog, this podcast? Is your volunteer website turning people away? 

Well, how do you know if it is? Well, the good news with digital marketing is the numbers are there, and they don’t lie. So, if you can work with your Mark Arms folks to get access to Google Analytics or for to help them. Or to for them to provide you data with how many people are visiting. Your volunteer pages or your recruitment pages, and I always say that in in, in plural, because there very rarely is it just one page, right? 

It’s a series of pages and at each page, how many people are visiting every month, and how many people are actually doing something on that page like clicking on a link or signing or applying, filling out a form, whatever it is, and every webpage should have a call to action. Of some kind of action. So, I want to get into this a little bit and you’ll, it will probably surprise you how many people that you are turning away every month, how many people come to visit, and then don’t take action. 

And if you can use those as a baseline and start to build off that and start to improve off that, you’re going to start to see more volunteers coming in as well. Here’s the thing about the folks that are visiting your website. First of all, they are, their brains are overwhelmed with input. They are putting in. 

Just imagine what the human brain is computing right now. Swiping, right, strolling. There’s a blot there, and so you’ve got to create thumb stopping. Content and stuff that’s simple that people can grasp quickly. Um, your brain likes to save energy. It takes shortcuts and ignores things. So, you know, we’ve got to make sure that people we’re speaking the language of today’s human brains, which is shortcuts, right? 

Which is quick information. And our devices are only training us to be increasingly that way. Now we can bemoan. With the problems with short-term thinking and the inability to point, point our attention to and give our attention to something for a long period of time, but it is what’s happening, so we’ve got to work with it, right? 

Our brains are risk averse and pain averse, and they want to feel good, and so. Why do things get clicks? Because there’s dopamine that gets sort of, we get a dopamine shot if we like something. We’re seeing something’s pleasurable when we’re watching tv, or we’re looking at our screens now. We can do that with volunteer information as well. 

There’s certainly a lot of good things happening in our organizations that can make people feel good and take feel good about acting or not, depending on what we’ve got on our webpages. The other thing is that the human brain can be taught, so if your organ, if your organization’s website. Your volunteer website, the website within the website is organized. 

Well then you can train people on how to utilize, easily utilize. So that’s why we spend a fair amount of time in our training about structure and structure of our websites. So, let’s get into this a little bit. What let’s, I have about 10 items here. About what may not be working on your volunteer website. 

So, while there are many reasons why modern volunteer websites aren’t converting visitors well today, I want to cover 10 key reasons that your volunteer website might be turning people away and what to do about it. So, let’s get into this. So, number one, volunteer website issue. Unclear or weak value proposition. 

This is something I see across the board. People will lead with the 101 ways that people must check boxes to be become a volunteer, and they may have like one picture of people volunteering. Gang, we’ve got to do better here, so we don’t, it’s one thing to talk about the mission of your organization. 

It’s another, it’s a completely other story to talk about. What’s in it for the visitor, for the prospective volunteer? So, there’s three questions I like to make sure that we’re answering on these websites. One is, or webpages I should say, when someone comes to a webpage, especially your main volunteer hub page, so the main page that people go to. 

You want to make sure that people can answer this for themselves right away. So, what does this organization do? Who is volunteering for? So, is it for me and how can I help? What’s the one simple step? The single call to action. So generic headlines like Volunteer today, or volunteer opportunities. I see a lot of. 

Main hub pages, recruitment hub pages with volunteer opportunities at the top of the page. And I’m like, oh, wasted space. We want to make sure that all our micro content and all our micro copies is working for us. So instead of volunteer today, why not? When you mentor a teen, you change a life forever and find new purpose on your own. 

So, it’s speaking to what the impact of the volunteer’s work, but also what they can expect for themselves. If people, if the site doesn’t quickly communicate what’s in it for the visitor visitors, bounce in seconds. If they’re not seeing an immediate reason to continue to read, they’re going to bounce. So, that’s the number one, unclear or weak value proposition, not what is your mission, but what’s in it for the visitor. 

And of course, what’s in it for the visitor is to support your mission. It’s really got to be a what’s in it for me and that kind of links to my second volunteer website issue, which is copywriting being about you, not them. You know, there’s a lot of, here’s what we do. Here’s our mission, here’s our vision, here’s our values, but we need to talk more about what’s in it for, for the visitor. 

So, people really don’t care about your entire history. They don’t necessarily care about. All the different programs you run, what they may care about, however, is the work you do, the people you do it with. So, the cause impact area is something that they may care about deeply. So, you’ve got to connect with people around the cause, the meaning of the cause. 

Why is it important to them and why is supporting you important? There’s in a Volunteer Nation episode 20, I talk about how to design irresistible volunteer opportunities, and I have a lot more copywriting tips there, so check that out. We do a lot of copywriting training also inside the community, and I teach people our pitch in six steps. 

So, we’ve got to be more talking about what you will get as a volunteer, what difference you will make, and we’ve got to be able to describe that in some compelling detail. The third volunteer website issue that might be turning people away is that there’s too many choices and no clear next steps. 

I see this a lot. I see a lot of. Web pages on nonprofit websites that have volunteering and donating on every page. And once you do that, number one rule of calls to action is only one per page. We want to make sure that whatever action we’re asking people to have or take, that there’s only one single one. 

Now, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t appear more than once on that page. If it’s a long page, then you’re going to repeat that call to action and you don’t even have to repeat it the same way. Doesn’t have to be the same button or the same copy, but the same action. We want to make sure that on your website, if you have a call to action, that it, it doesn’t necessarily have to be apply now either. 

It could be sign up for 15 minutes info call, or it could be downloading this fact sheet and then you have their email address, and you can start nurturing them. It could be sign up for our next training. It could be taking our quiz about what volunteering opportunities might be best for you. There’s great quiz software out there. 

Score app is one. I’ll put a link in the show notes. They’re not free, but they’re helpful to help. Get folks interacting with your website a little bit more. So, there’s lots of calls to action that are not necessarily apply now because people may not be ready to apply. Now. If that’s your only call to action, then you’re not giving anybody an opportunity to start a conversation with you. 

Number four, volunteer website issue. Stocky, inauthentic imagery. Now I use a lot of stock images on my websites. And in our blog posts and in our podcast episodes and all that, but that’s because I don’t have these wonderful people that I work with in my organization. Now, when I work with people in my company, of course, they’re wonderful, but you as a nonprofit have no reason to be using stock images of people. 

There are images of volunteers, staff, potential clients. Now, of course, you need to get. Approval or animals you work with, you need to get approval. Of course. However, wouldn’t it be funny if you needed to get approval from animals? They would put their little paw print on your release form. Yes, you must put your paw print in. 

Only an animal lover would say something like that. Anyway, let’s get back to this. But you know, if photos look generic, colder, staged, people just don’t feel like they can trust you. People will act on behalf of humans, not faceless. Stock images, authentic visuals convert better. They just do, and they don’t have to be as perfect and polished as stock images, but they do need to be clear. 

I don’t, I’m not a fan of photographs with a hundred people in them, or 50 people in them, or even 10 people in them. I like. Pictures of small groups and I like smiling faces close. It’s more about the mood than it is about showing people exactly what’s going on. You also want to make sure you have diverse faces in your photos, so we want to make sure that our photos are conveying a mood. 

And also showing the diversity of people that you welcome into your organization so people can look at your images and say, oh, there’s people that are like me. A lot of issues with websites are that the images really don’t feel authentic, and you have so many folks and today’s smartphones, they can take amazing images. 

It can take ama amazing pictures, so you don’t need necessarily a professional photographer. All right, let’s take a pause from my quick breakdown of how to improve your volunteer website. I’m going to have six more areas that you want to look at, issues that might be turning people away. So don’t go anywhere. We’ll be right back.  

VOLUNTEER PRO IMPACT LAB 

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It’s a clear process that takes careful attention with a focus on impact. In the end, you need a system in place that’s clear. Standardized efficient, and that gets results. In addition, and maybe this is the most important, you need a volunteer program design that directly contributes to your organization’s most critical goals. 

That’s where the Volunteer Pro Impact Lab comes in. When it comes to effective volunteer engagement, our bespoke volunteer strategy success path model, which is the heart of our resources and strategic advising, will help you transform your volunteer strategy from fundamental to a fully mature what’s working now approach and all in less time. 

With our online assessment, you’ll quickly gain clarity on precisely where to focus your efforts, and we’ll provide recommendations for the exact steps needed for sustainable growth, regardless of how large or small your organization is or what your cause impact area or focus is.  

Our program development and implementation support model will help you build a strong foundation, so volunteerism can thrive at your good cause. If you’re interested in learning more, go to volpro.net/join and we’ll share how to get started and what’s involved.   

Okay, we’re back with my breakdown of. How to improve your volunteer website and issues that might be turning people away. Let’s look at number five. Number five of your volunteer website issues is no social proof or trust signals. This is a slam dunk. This is so important, and just we include testimonials on our website. Case studies, et cetera, because they work, because people need to know that you’re not quote unquote selling something that isn’t real. 

So, if your website is missing reviews, testimonials, media mentions, success stories, or recognizable partner logos, whatever it is. Now, you don’t need to include all of these, but you need to include some of them. People need to know that there is what’s called social proof or trust signals. So, what is a social proof? 

Social proof is basically our human PAC mentality. If we see a group of people doing something, we assume it’s the correct. Mode of behaving and the more uncertain we are, the more powerful social proof is. It’s called normative in psychology terms. It’s called normative social influence, and it’s just how we behave as human beings. 

We are a community-based type of being in the world. And if we weren’t, we probably would not have survived and developed into the sophisticated species that we are. And so, people really fear being shunned or not being part of a community. Even if we’re introverts, we need to be part of a community. You can think about social proof or trust signals as kind of educating people, like, look what all these people are doing. 

It must be the right thing. So, the more social proof you can include, and trust signals you can include on your website, the better because volunteers who are visiting are going to be. More likely to want to join because they, oh, there’s, I’m seeing people like me. I’m seeing people trust and support this organization. 

This organization must be worthy of my trust as well. So, you want to make sure you’re including those. And there’s lots of work to be done in this area, not just success stories E either, because success stories require people to read quite a bit. And if you can put just punchy testimonials from your volunteers and those, they serve all the better. 

Okay. Number six of your volunteer website issues, no sense of urgency or fear of missing out. So, people will go to websites and they’ll. See that, oh, I could volunteer here. Uh, maybe I’ll come back another time and volunteer. I don’t know. I don’t know if I want to or not. People get distracted quickly, so you’re either wanting to capture folks’ emails so that you can have a conversation with them and invite them to volunteer or include deadlines for things. 

Now there’s a couple of ways to create urgency. One is through scarcity. So, you can say, hey, we’ve got a training next month or next week. We only have five seats left. Or you can create a sense of urgency through deadlines. So, our training signups, and on Monday at 5:00 PM. If you don’t create that sense of urgency or scarcity, people will procrastinate and a lot of people will abandon your, your website and not sign up. 

That said, I would say that you have a lot of people who are coming to your website who are poking around. They’re trying to figure out, and they’re researching different volunteer opportunities. They’re going to different websites. They’re looking at the different volunteer opportunities. They’re trying to figure out which one’s the right match. 

Of course, they may be going on volunteer recruitment websites as well, but people like to do a little research. They might have been sent by a social media; someone did a social media share. Whatever it may be. They’re doing a little more research. So, people will look at things prior to buying. And if you think about, if you go to Amazon, you kind of click through, you start to do your research, you look at the testimonials, you look at the stars, you look at the pictures, you start looking at the videos like someone’s unboxing something. 

You start to look at the details, the product details. If you’re spending some money now on something small, maybe you’re not doing all that research, but people are used to researching but quickly. And so, we want to make sure that our volunteer website is helping them do that research quickly, but we also want to keep people moving and acting. 

But if they’re indecisive about volunteering, you want to offer other things that are halfway there. Like, hey, we’re having a 30-minute info session, a webinar next week. Join us and sign up now, and this is the date and time. So, here’s the deadline to sign up and join us so you can learn more. You’ve got to give people, or, hey, we’ve got an open house. 

Here’s the sign up and sign up by this date. You want to give people an intermediate way to learn more about you before you apply. One of the biggest mistakes I see is that folks will send people to, they’ll have a volunteer recruitment page, and they’ll immediately ask people to register for software to put their email address in and to start browsing for an opportunity. 

Well, what about the other people who are still thinking about it? You’re, they’re just bouncing off your website and they’re probably never coming back. So, you’ve got to start conversations with those people who are still. Mulling it over because you, those people are easier to convert to active volunteers than a complete stranger that knows nothing about you, right? 

And so you don’t want to waste that traffic, is what I’m trying to say. So along traffic lines, number seven of your volunteer website issue is a mismatch with traffic source. So, what that means is people will. To either get an ad, a search result, or a social media post that promises one thing, but when they get to the webpage, it looks like they’re in a, a, an entirely different universe. 

The fonts are different, the colors are different, the picture’s different, the messaging’s different, and. If there’s a disconnect, that trust is lost instantly. Because people are like, I just been spammed, or someone’s trying to scam me because people have for good reason, need to have a little discretion about the internet because there is a lot of stuff going on. 

People are trying to sell; people are trying to steal from people. There are all kinds of things that happen on the internet. So people are distrusting and for good reason. So, we’ve got to take care to build trust. Often, I will post a social media post, and I will use the same image that’s on the webpage that I’m sending people to, so it’s very clear. 

I’ll make sure the messaging is similar, so people are like, okay, I’m following a journey. I trust this source that has taken me on this journey. So, you really must click through things to see how it feels when you’re referring people to your volunteer website. Okay, number eight of your volunteer website issue. 

Poor user experience or UX in the web design terms and hard navigation or challenging navigation, confusing navigation. What I find often is one of the navigational issues that I find really makes me grumpy. I’ll go to a website, and it’ll say, get involved. Get involved is like it. It’s not direct. Get involved is not a direct thing. 

Volunteer here is a direct statement. Get involved is not. And so often there’ll be a get involved and then there’ll be a website menu that drops down and gives you like 10 or eight different things. And I have to say, gang, that’s already too complicated for people. And so that is difficult user experience. 

Now when you have a lot of ways for people to get involved, yes, it’s going to take some savvy design and structuring of your website, but if volunteerism is important and you need volunteers, then how about a button that says volunteer now or just. Link in your menu that says volunteer. You got to think when you’re thinking about navigation. 

Best thing to do is to pull up your website on your phone and see how many clicks it takes you on your phone to get to your volunteer page or your volunteer. Website within the website, right, to get to learn about volunteering. How many clicks does it take, and does it work well on your phone? Because if you think about it, a lot of people are hanging out at home on their couch binging Netflix, and they think to themselves, you know what, I want to volunteer, and they pull out their phone, go to Google. Search volunteer opportunities near me. Oh, here it is. And they go on your website. You pop up and they go up on your website. And that’s where the trouble starts, because if it’s complicated or doesn’t work on a phone. They’re clicking away and they’re going off and doing something else, they’re going back to their movie. 

They’re like, eh, I don’t know. Maybe not. Let me go make some popcorn and think about it. And that’s the end of that, right? So, any hidden buttons, clutter menus. A lot of dropdown menus, all that, people get stuck, and they’re gone. The ninth volunteer website issue I want to talk about is bad mobile experience, which I just basically talked about, but I will say that many websites still aren’t truly mobile optimized, particularly in the nonprofit space and. 

Tiny buttons, layouts that break on phones for some. And you can tell from how do you know how many people are going on your website, on mobile? Ask your marcomms people to tell you from Google Analytics. They can tell you those numbers are there. And so, in some industries, mobile is 60% of traffic. And I know even recent research on donations; the percentage of donations being made online is on the upswing big time. And so, people are using their phones to interact with your organization, and so we’ve got to make sure that the mobile experience is good. The other thing is just we were having this conversation today about our blog posts and refreshing, as I said earlier, blog posts. 

And we talked about wraparound text around images. Should we do wraparound text around images? And I said, I don’t think so because think about on phones. Now, the phone, if you’re mobile optimized, the text will more than likely go under the image. It will automatically if you have a responsive site. But I’m not going to leave that up to chance. 

Let’s just make sure that everything’s up and down, sort of easy to scroll and the text and the images appear, but it means making sure that our buttons are big enough to read, making sure that any images we’re using, you can read them on a phone and that they’re not huge. So, it’s again, pulling out your phone and really taking an honest look at your volunteer website can be a real help. 

Okay, last number 10, volunteer website issue. It’s like UX and the bad mobile experience, but slow load times. So. One of the things you’ve got to think about is if when you’re putting images, for example, on your website, are you compressing them or are you just putting on, I don’t know how many millions of pixels, but if it’s a big file size, it will slow down your website. 

There’s also other re ways to, to optimize the speed of your website, but that’s one. So even a few seconds of delay, nowadays, people will abandon ship. Especially on mobile. If they’re like waiting and waiting for something to load, they’re going to click away. So, some studies have shown that even a one second delay can drop conversions by 7% or more. 

So, you want to look at your load times, both on desktop and mobile. And again, your Marco Comms people should be able to tell you that. And you should be talking with your web designer about optimizing for that. There are a few other things I might mention about websites that I do on a couple of other episodes that I’m going to link to but also share with you right now. 

One is Volunteer Nation episode 5: Eight Ways Your nonprofit website is failing to attract volunteers. You’ll hear similar themes, but I think. What’s really clear now in what’s working now is simplify. Simplify, and then Volunteer Nation, episode 59: 6 must have strategies to recruit volunteers using your website, but again, as we move forward, look at what websites when you go to websites. 

What websites pique your interest? What websites do you spend time on? What do they look like? How do they work? And you’ll find that we are getting simpler. A lot of really, you know, billion-dollar marketing companies or companies that teach marketing. You’ll see that their websites are very simple and that they’re using navigation to click back and that they’re using email to communicate the details of what they’re offering. 

And so instead of putting an encyclopedia on your website and expecting people to spend half an hour reading through it, you’ve got to capture interest and you’ve got to start having a conversation, whether it’s digitally or lifetime. And really start to engage with people. That’s what it’s going to take right now. 

If you look at your analytics, I’m pretty sure that your website is turning people away. The question is, I mean, all websites, people abandon, not, not every website is for every person. So obviously PE people come, and they don’t act. There’s, you can expect that a certain percentage will not act, but the question is – how many people are getting turned away, and if you just made updates to your website, you wouldn’t have to do any more work with recruiting that the people that are coming to your website, a higher percentage of them would convert, which would make your life a lot easier. So, there’s a real business case to be made for improving your website. 

To wrap up, here’s what to do if you are not doing it right now, make sure your headline of your main volunteer recruitment webpage. Make sure that headline and maybe the sub headline, what is this? Who is it for, and why should I care? Make one single call to action per page and make that next step crystal clear. 

What should people do? And not get involved. Get involved is way too vague. You got to tell people what to do. Exactly. Make sure your webpage loads fast, especially on mobile use real photos, real stories, real proof of people supporting you. Write to your visitors’ pain points and dreams, not your internal org chart, your list of programs, or your mission statement. 

Test. Your tiny tweaks will compound over time, and the more you test, the more you know. So, there’s all kinds of tools. Like Hotjar is an interesting tool. I’ll put a link to that where you can do heat mapping and I think it’s still free where you can see where people are looking, but. In the end, if all you do is set a baseline with Google Analytics for each of your pages of how many visitors and how many people are taking that action, and then just keep testing, keep seeing when you make tweaks, does it improve your results. 

Again, I’ll just reiterate, your volunteer website is your most powerful asset to engage volunteers. So, take the time to make sure it’s attracting, not repelling your visitors. So, thank you for joining me in this episode of the Volunteer Nation Podcast. As you can tell, I’m quite passionate about websites. 

Excuse me. I’m going to take a sip of tea. Okay, there we go. I am very passionate about our websites. I think we have a lot of work to do, and I think when organizations are. Not attracting volunteers. They often think that it’s the community, the community’s fault, and they’re like, hey, well people aren’t joining us because they don’t care. 

Well, maybe people are not joining you because your website isn’t that great and it’s not compelling and exciting and it’s not really communicating what you have on offer. Maybe what you have on offer is fabulous, but your website’s not communicating it properly or it’s hard to navigate. Or people just aren’t finding you and if they don’t find you on Google, they don’t know you exist. 

And so, websites are so essential. If I were a volunteer coordinator and I was only working on one thing right now, well, okay, I’m going to say two things just because I would work on my website. And I would work on nurture campaigns and email campaigns to reach and start conversations with prospective volunteers. 

That’s what I would work on. It’s not social media. It’s not what’s my flyer going to look like? It’s your website. It’s so essential to what you do. So, I hope I’ve made the case. I hope I’ve given you some practical things to look for and to analyze. Just look at your website and if you found this information helpful, I hope you’ll share it with a friend. 

Maybe share it with your marcomms folks, your web designer. Now, if your web designer’s really on top of things, they probably know all these things already, but I will reiterate that even the best of marketing firms gets it wrong sometimes. I was just working with a firm on Facebook advertising. And when I would look at the creative for approval, I would say, hey, these buttons are way too small, or this text is way too small. 

If you brought this up on a phone, you wouldn’t be able to read it. Now I’m paying these people who are experts, so not everybody gets it right all the time. So, we all must be learners. When we’re marketing things are changing rapidly in the world. People are not going to spend a lot of time reading. I hate to say it, but they’re not. 

And so, we’ve got to have very simple websites that get people to take action and start taking one simple step and then another baby step, and then another baby step until they become an active volunteer. All right, so take care everybody. I hope to see you next week, same time, same place here on the Volunteer Nation.