Create an Effective and Helpful Hub for Nonprofit Members

Does your nonprofit have an area of your website that requires members or constituents to login? Call it a Dashboard, Portal, or a Membership Center – whatever the name, you can think of it as a “homepage” for the constituent or member, and this can be enormously valuable to your audience.

To provide the best possible experience of your site, make sure this helpful hub for nonprofit members is relevant and even personalized.

There’s a difference in your experience when you go on a museum tour by yourself vs. having a docent lead you through. When you have someone sharing the stories behind what you are looking at, you remember them more and have a better overall impression of the museum. The same is true for your members or constituents when they come to your website. They want a guide and you can give them a personal tour through your helpful hub.

Provide a valuable connection point with member features.

Let users go beyond updating their email, changing their password, and managing their membership. By adding special features that allow for connection, you drive engagement with your organization and build trust. Some ideas for features that might work for your audience:

• Add a feedback widget (suggestion box, questions, etc…).
• Show their registration history for classes, events, etc…
• Show upcoming classes, events, etc…
• Offer a button that prints out a personalized certificate for the last training.
• List any products or orders they have placed.
• Show their donation history and yearly total, including a button for managing their donations.

Drive results by providing information.

Most nonprofits have a blog, newsletter or some sort of regular communication that goes out to the public. On a dashboard, you can push exclusive information to a more targeted audience. This might look like:

• Highlighting a specific blog post for members.
• Showcasing the impact of donations over the last quarter to encourage more people to give.
• Sharing exclusive, non-public information you don’t want to broadcast to the public but want to make sure your members see.
• Offering exclusive content (for example, a land trust could provide hiking trail maps).

Personalize the experience for your most important audience.

Any data you are collecting can be used to share personalized information to encourage further engagement. You might want to:

• Allow your members or constituents to personalize the dashboard with relevant information by bookmarking their favorite tools or resources from the website.
• Display news/blog content that is tagged with particular “interests” (if you collect that preference data).
• Use the member’s most recent donation status to show how going to a higher donation bracket would level up their impact.

When your members or constituents have a helpful hub with information and access they need to engage with your nonprofit in a personalized experience, their participation (and donations) will soar!

Send a request to your support email or contact us to think through adding membership features to your website.