Every so often I get the chance to do a site for free. Not free as in the case of family members wanting something for nothing but free as in a charity for a deserving cause.
In this case it’s the Centre for Animal Rehabilitation and Education or C.A.R.E. as they’re known. It’s a long title but basically it’s a baboon sanctuary. I have a soft spot for baboons and I think they get a bum rap.
I did two sites for them years ago and then they went somewhere else. Years passed and last I looked them up and they had a dreadful site. For an operation that relies absolutely on charity with no governmental help, the website is critical and this was a poor site.
The problem places such as these have with money extends to the website. They cannot possibly afford a professional website of probably in excess of R10,000 so rely on free help. They are loathe to turn down an offer and are at the mercy of the skill level of the offerer – as in the case of the current website.
I came across the same crappy site a month ago and thought ‘Bugger this’ and got hold of them. I can do a far better job – and got the job. Doing a website for a cause you believe in is very satisfying.
One of the problems with charities is that they are full of those who believe passionately about its causes and they tend the run off at the mouth, churning out scads of readerless prose. Secondly, you have to have a Web Nazi. The web Nazi is the single person in the organization who has the authority to filter the more ridiculous agendas from the charity. You cannot deal with a mob.
The mob lose the plot early on. Charity websites are business websites. They are in the business of getting money out of people and their currency is compassion. Compassion is what they sell and in this respect they are a standard marketing website.
However, they are different to standard business websites. These often do not need to engage the visitor to any extent and many purchases are impulse buys. Someone who wishes to donate cash or kind to a charity will scrutinize it thoroughly to ensure that his donation is not mismanaged and therefore every part of the website has to work towards this end. A business website’s pages more often than not are for search engines rather than humans but not in the case of charities. A charity website has to answer every question a potential donor might put to it and will have to establish credibility in a big way.
This charity also relies on paying volunteers so the experiences of volunteers are essential to the recruitment of others.
Fortunately, baboons are very photogenic so it is not difficult to tug at heart strings. But, the serious side of the operation is not the sanctuary part but the coalescence of groups of orphan baboons into viable troops and their eventual release to the wild.
The site is currently at draft level at warthog.co.za/primatecare.