Rachael Rainbow and I had a fascinating day out at the Digital Communications for Charities conference back in January, where I gave a talk on ‘Effective fundraising through better user experience’. The focus of the conference was online fundraising for charities and it was really refreshing for us to get the client-side perspective on this.

There were some excellent talks throughout the conference. My highlights included The Good Agency discussing how they used free social networking tools to track the effectiveness of various social networking activities for Compassion in World Farming, and more surprisingly, a talk by the Charity Technology Trust on the legality issues inherent in online fundraising.

The session I ran discussed how charities could build a framework to support building business cases for making improvements to the user experience of their online fundraising. This framework took quantitative data from web analytics along with the findings of usability evaluations to estimate the revenue potential in resolving specific user experience issues. From the feedback on the day, I think that this empirical approach really struck a chord, especially in the current economic climate.

If you’d like to find out a little more about this talk, please take a look at the presentation here.