How can our website survive? This is the question all the Non-profit Website has to answer. Since making money is not their purpose, they have to know how to build up cohesion on the Internet users and keep moving forward in the lowest cost. This is the lesson they have to learn very well.

Asking for donation through website is much more difficult than do it through communicating with the public face to face. Normally people feeling distance and no willing to support. Therefore all the websites, which need on line donation, have to put more heart on their contents. If we carefully check the websites run by some non-profit Organization, for example, the website for certain disease foundation, they always share lots of real case and provide many related news. Through this way, they tried to arouse people’s compassion in order to promote their donation support. Also, holding special event is also a good way of promotion. In World Vision Day, the related websites provided living video and clips to encourage more web users participating in it. To some websites which aiming to promote some important concepts to public, they can focus on posting precise and detail knowledge to build up their image. It is also a very good way to post some interesting and practical information to attract public’s attention and strengthen cohesion.

One web master who run a “Green Environment campaign ” website for 8 years shared in this way: “although now their fixed monthly donation can reach around five thousand dollars while irregular personal donation is around two to ten thousands, at the beginning the donation they can receive is very little. Normally it will use around one and half years for the public to build up their trust towards the website.” Actually website can be a very persuasive tool to gain trust, if people see this website keep updating and their information is good, they will trust this organization even more.”

Use website to build up trust

Since we can build up trust through the website, how to use “group human resource” is very important. For example, there is a website which promotes the community for disabled people. The information they provided about where disabled people can go to travel or eat has already make the website receive high attention. At the same time, they set up forum and encourage web user to post the pictures about the place lack of aid facilities or dangerous to the disables and then reflect these problem to the related authorities through the web runners. Through this way of deep communication, web users keep creating the new topics and boost the traffic. Another “environment information centre” website use the way of recruiting volunteers to build up their cohesion, and now there are around 30 volunteers for their website. Their main duty is to search national and international environment news. During the training, the concept of the website is promoted and the traffics also increase.

Something has to be mentioned is, in order to promote the website to the public, accumulating the reputation is very important, this is what we call “website sales”. To the small website, join some website competition, like ideal show, Demo and so on, is a sales chance for free. During the competition, they will have more chance to explore to the media. If the service you provide is special or very hot, then it might bring lots of news about the website. In addition, some competition they do have reward, it may also help the website to find the sponsors as well.

The supports besides money aids

Surely it is good if the website can receive money directly to survive, but there are lots of aids which are virtual too. For example, some activities may provide the free broadband to the candidates. Actually it is very difficult for the website to receive free broadband. To non-profit website, broadband fee is still an unavoidable expanse.

Furthermore, some activities may provide the chance to introduce the websites to the related national or international organization. To this website this is a very strong support besides money aids.

Personally donation, the aids from social communities, government allowance and other resources, all of these are the ideal supports for non-profit website to keep running. With the valuable content and updated interesting topics, websites can also join more public activities to earn reputation and media explosion. All of these efforts will help the websites to get more donations and let the website fulfil the purpose of their existence. And all these methods can be used not just for the non-profit website, but some newly launched commercial website as well.

Edited By Vicky Yin