Photo editing tools for online fundraising
February 28th, 2012 Design Tip 0

How instill more storytelling into your online fundraising site? Think about magazines — use images!

Images help you communicate your message and help the reader understand what you’re about. You should incorporate some eye-catching images along with content about your fundraising campaign.

One of the hardest parts if finding an image and editing it for us. There are a a few photo editing tools available to help you reach this goal, but which ones provide the best value?

1.) Photoshop – Adobe’s Photoshop Family is the leader of photo editing software, but the accompanying price tag can be scary for those …

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Applying color theory to online fundraising
January 31st, 2012 Design Tip 1 »

Online fundraising websites need to compel their visitors to action. Your fundraising efforts should incorporate design and marketing techniques for the maximum effect. One such tool, color theory, has the potential to improve your nonprofit’s success and, as is always the goal with nonprofit ventures, create a greater social impact.

Color theory is the study of how different colors, as well as mixtures of colors, impact an individual. A great deal of marketing and scientific research has gone into improving our understanding of which colors speak to our donors, and which colors do not.

Using the correct combinations of colors …

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Beautiful design yields more donations
November 15th, 2011 Design Tip 4

Your fundraising site represents who you are what what you stand for. Visitors are looking for your who you are and information about your story. When they see it for the first time, they’re thinking:

- Can I trust this nonprofit?
- What are they fighting for?
- Do I identify with them?
- Why should I support them?

There are many factors that make up an effective fundraising site and one of them is its design. A study (How Do People Evaluate a Web Site’s Credibility?) from Stanford University and Consumer Web Watch found that websites with …

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Non-Profit Resource Guide – Online Fundraising Platform Setup

Compass

We’ve been looking at all the non-profits using our online fundraising software and figuring out what makes nonprofits super successful vs moderately successful. One of the things that came up from this study is that the super successful non-profits always completed the setup process in our platform. To help other non-profits get better at it, we’ve written up a guide that walks the user step-by-step on getting the most out of our fundraising platform.

If you follow it, setting up a beautiful and fully personalized online fundraising site will be quick and easy. Just follow these instructions to get it …

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Using the Right Logo Image – Transparent PNG
May 2nd, 2011 Design Tip 0

Logos with colored backgrounds often clash with the background color of your website. Unless you want change the color of your site, you need transparent PNG logos that seamlessly integrate with your page.

Often times, whoever created your logo would be able to give you an image with transparent background. If not possible, we’ll walk you through on how you can make your logo have a transparent background through this post. This isn’t the easiest thing to do yourself, but with some practice, you can make it perfect.

If you have a logo with colored background, you must first make …

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Tips From A Website Guru
February 28th, 2011 Design Tip 2

We presented on non-profit web and tech with Jenni Schwartz at NYU a while back. She brings a wealth of experience in website design and best practices. We often get questions about enhancing non-profit websites, so we asked her to share a few tips with you.

Jenni is the owner of Jenni Schwartz Design LLC, a boutique design studio in New York City specializing in branding, website design and development, and social media marketing.

You can view Jenni’s work at www.jennischwartz.com and follow her on Twitter @jschwartzdesign.

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What is the importance of good visual design?

Good visual design …

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The Basic Concept of Web Colors
February 23rd, 2011 Design Tip 0

In our Page Editor, you can change colors using the on screen color palette. HEX codes of colors associated with your organization can be used, in lieu of the color palette, to give you more accurate color results. More accurate colors give the donor and supporters a better fundraising experience. But before we explain HEX codes, we’ll need to explain RGB.

RGB is a color model in which red/green/blue colors are added together to produce a specific color. It’s like the color wheel that we learned in grade school.

Here is an example. Below you see a color swatch and five …

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