How to Show Your Organization’s Impact Online: 5 Tips

Your nonprofit’s website may feature all the latest bells and whistles your content management system has to offer, like a dynamic homepage, interactive content, and professional videos. However, these features alone won’t help you recruit and retain new supporters long term. 

75% of regular nonprofit donors want information about an organization’s impact, and your website is the perfect place to keep them in the loop. To effectively maintain your audience’s attention and support, you need to demonstrate your organization’s impact. 

Highlighting impact not only helps donors understand their gifts truly matter but also keeps them coming back to your site regularly. Let’s review the five strategies top nonprofit websites use to showcase their impact effectively. 

1. Prioritize impact reporting.

Regularly reporting the results of your nonprofit’s projects and programs helps supporters understand exactly how you’re working to further your mission. Follow these steps to give supporters all the necessary context through reporting: 

1. Define key metrics. Set realistic benchmarks for your nonprofit’s programs and identify key metrics to measure. For example, let’s say one of your goals this year is to reach 500 participants in your community financial literacy program. By tracking the total number of program participants, you can see whether you hit your goal by the end of the year. 
2. Run regular reports. Set up your organization’s constituent relationship management system (CRM) to run regular reports on your progress. Depending on the timeframe of your goals, you could measure progress weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually. 
3. Package data into a story. Contextualize your reports using storytelling to give supporters greater insight into your ongoing operations. For example, don’t just tell supporters you exceeded your financial literacy program participation goal by 200 members. Inform audience members about the key wins that allowed you to expand your program, including a fundraising boost from a local business sponsor and an awareness boost via a successful social media campaign. 

Use your website’s blog to regularly update supporters on current initiatives. Share your reports using engaging media like graphs, charts, maps, infographics, and video animations. Blog posts with more visuals tend to be the most effective—34% of bloggers say they see strong results from using 10 or more images in an article.

2. Spotlight your annual reports prominently. 

Your nonprofit’s annual report recaps your wins from the past year and demonstrates the extent of the support you provide to the community. Explore these best practices and examples to make these reports easy to find and engaging:

• Create an annual report landing page. Store links to your digitized annual reports on one convenient landing page. 
• Example: The Boys & Girls Clubs of America annual reports page has links to every report from 2016 onward.
  
  
• Make your reports digital and mobile-friendly. Upload your report in a digital-friendly format, such as a flipbook or PDF, to improve the online reading experience. Also, ensure your report can be viewed easily in portrait format to enhance mobile readability. 
• Example: Look at how Habitat for Humanity’s digital 2023 annual report uses dynamic content such as photos and parallax scrolling to enhance the user experience. Readers can also download a printable PDF version. 

• Consider using video. Use video to spotlight your biggest wins from the year, such as expanding your services to new communities or hitting an all-time clothing donation high. 
• Example: Watch the Georgia River Network’s Annual Report 2022 video to see an example of ways to spotlight your most significant achievements from the year. 

By making your annual reports easily accessible, you can use them to support your fundraising initiatives. For example, let’s say you’re introducing a prospective major to your organization and explaining its impact on the community. When you have organized, streamlined digital annual reports, you can easily pull them up in a meeting or email them to prospects so they can read more about your accomplishments and financial information. 

3. Maintain data hygiene. 

Maintaining clean, updated data enhances reporting efficiency and accuracy. As a result, you can foster greater trust and transparency with your audience. 

360MatchPro’s data hygiene guide recommends taking these steps to clean your organization’s data:

• Audit your database. Review internal databases, such as your CRM and volunteer management software, to check and correct errors, duplicate entries, and missing information. You may need to conduct a data append or directly contact constituents to add missing data. 
• Set data standardization procedures. Develop uniform, team-wide standards for inputting new information into your database to prevent future errors. For example, you might set standard street address and phone number formats.
• Maintain ethical data collection and use. Use security measures, such as encryption and user access controls, to keep constituent information safe. Share a clear data policy on your website for how your organization collects, stores, and uses data in your reporting or fundraising efforts. Allow supporters to opt out of data collection at any time and respect their wishes by removing them from your database. 

Conduct regular data hygiene refreshes and other updates, such as website maintenance procedures. Prioritizing these refreshes lets you quickly catch errors and prevent them from disrupting your reporting processes. 

4. Highlight testimonials.

Instead of just telling your audience why your work is important, use testimonials to show them. Give a voice to the community members you work with daily, allowing them to share their unique perspectives on your nonprofit’s impact. 

Create a landing page to spotlight testimonials from a variety of individuals, such as: 

• Beneficiaries, who can share their perspectives on the support they’ve received from your organization. For example, Kanopi’s healthcare web design guide spotlights the Boston Children’s Hospital as an effective example of sharing patient stories. Each story includes direct quotes from patients and their families and links to the division or center where the child received care.  
• Volunteers, who can discuss the benefits they’ve received from volunteering with your cause, like making new friends and being a part of a cause they believe in. 
• Staff or board members, who can talk about the personal and professional benefits they’ve gained from working with your organization, including new skills or fulfilling career paths. 

Testimonials effectively demonstrate your impact because they rely on social proof, the psychological phenomenon where people mimic the actions of others in a given situation. When new audience members see that your organization has been endorsed by a variety of individuals within your community, they’ll be more likely to trust you. They may even be more inclined to get involved themselves, whether by accessing your services or becoming volunteers or donors. 

5. Showcase your nonprofit’s partnerships and external coverage. 

Your nonprofit doesn’t exist in a vacuum—you probably engage with other organizations in your community often by co-hosting events or sharing resources. If you’re particularly effective at achieving mission-related goals, you may have even picked up some local press coverage for different events or programs.

Make the most of these partnerships and external coverage opportunities by promoting them on your website. For example, you can highlight: 

• News coverage from local papers, radio stations, or TV stations
• Podcast appearances by your staff members, leaders, or board members 
• Guest blogs you’ve written for other organizations’ websites
• Webinars that your nonprofit has participated in
• Nonprofit conference appearances and other presentations you’ve made
• Events you’ve co-hosted with other community organizations

Spotlighting external coverage and partnerships helps build your organization’s authority within your community. When community members see that your organization partners with local businesses or other nonprofits they know and respect, they’ll feel that your nonprofit is more trustworthy by association. 

Wrapping up: Tracking the success of your efforts

As you try out these strategies, collect audience feedback to assess the effectiveness of your impact reporting and storytelling. Ask audience members if they clearly understand what your organization does and how you accomplish your goals. If any audience members express confusion or lack of confidence about your mission, review your reporting practices and look for ways to enhance your strategy to better convey your impact.