Ben Blankley's articles

Don’t call them ‘case studies’ in any public-facing materials I hope that’s obvious, but I’ll say it just in case. ‘Case studies’ are things in your M&E reports. They sound clinical and they bring to mind rather dry outcomes and outputs. For the purposes of this blog post though,  I’ll refer to them as ‘case […]

I ran a charity website (and indeed whole digital department) for six years (for War Child). I had come from a communications background (at Comic Relief) and was reasonably IT literate, but had never been solely responsible for a charity’s website before. In the years since I have worked with, and spoken to, dozens of […]

In a recent blog post I had a look at the top 100 charity websites and the common features that many of them share. Why is it that the charity sector is so diverse, yet our websites tend to look so similar? ‘Good artists copy, great artists steal’ It’s not clear whether Picasso ever actually […]

When thinking about (re)designing your charity website it’s natural to have a look at what other charities have done in order to spark some ideas and inspiration. And in particular it’s useful to see how the big boys do it – the charities with all the money and in-house marketing teams who can afford to […]

Enlist now if this is you: You’re a small charity that wants more donors, fundraisers etc? You’re finding it hard to compete with big rivals with big pockets? You have a website but people don’t seem to really engage with it?   First up – the shouty sergeant major with some harsh words of truth […]

I talked in a previous blog about identifying the purpose(s) of your charity website and ways of measuring its success. Today let’s build upon that with a practical tool to help you do just that. Google Analytics = Information overload Google Analytics is a brilliant, free tool. But most website owners rarely make use of […]

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a bit like the government’s Brexit policy – everyone knows it is important, but most of us are a little unsure as to exactly what it is. Although other search engines exist, we’ll refer primarily to Google as that’s the most important one. SEO is ultimately about getting your site’s […]

On the one hand, it’s obvious. It’s 2017, you have to have a website. Because everyone’s got one. On the other hand, have you ever stopped to think about what the purpose of it is, and how you measure its success? For an ecommerce or business site that’s easy to answer as those organisations have […]