Hitting the Heart, a report by dotMailer, looked at the homepages and online donation paths of the UK's leading 15 charities and assessed them against 26 criteria, awarding each a score out of 100. It concluded that while the homepages of UK charity websites are following digital marketing best practice in terms of design and content, they are failing to make the most of opportunities to build loyalty among visitors.
Charities are also failing to put their website at the heart of a wider digital marketing strategy and neglecting donor contact and up-sell opportunities, according to the study.
Cancer Research UK leads the index with a score of 81% followed by Save the Children, Action for Blind People and British Heart Foundation with 80%, 79.5% and 79.5% respectively. Homepages generally scored good marks overall for design, layout and clarity of message with high average scores in particular for putting key messages above the fold (78%), fresh content (78%) and easy-to-use search (100%).
Many charities received low scores for areas such as collecting permission-based email sign-ups and contact data, trading donors up in the donation path and following donations up with relationship building emails. None of the charities surveyed scored any points for sending follow-up email campaigns to donors within 30 days of the transaction.
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