It’s a given that if you want to be successful your nonprofit needs to have a web presence. But being online isn’t enough. We’ve discussed having a social media presence can increase donations to your nonprofit, but a well-designed website that implements graphics and video can increase interactions with your visitors and generate more action on behalf of your nonprofit.

The logic behind nonprofit web design is fairly simple - your visitors are people, too. As a nonprofit, you only have seconds to capture their attention and provide the most compelling information. These are 38 websites that have it down. The longer you can have visitors stay on your website, the more likely they are to connect with your brand and take an action – be it signing up for your email list, finding your nonprofit on social media, or donating to your cause. Stay tuned to the Fission blog for more information on what web elements you can implement to have your nonprofit stay up-to-date and generate results.

The trend in graphic design, especially with graphics spreading information, can be seen most visibly in the rise of infographics. Infographics generate over 1,000 actions on social networks compared to nearly 250 by other posts - specifically on Twitter (578 retweets vs. 62) and StumbleUpon (330 vs. 39 pageviews). What better way to display the meteoric rise of infographics than with an infographic itself? From the link from Mashable, it’s evident that infographics are effective around the world and continue to get more popular as time goes on. .NET Magazine writes that designing for nonprofits can often be a challenge, but the results that it can net for the nonprofit are worth doing the work to meet and exceed the challenge. We’ll be featuring some of the best tips on graphic design in a later post in this series.

And last but not least, the use of video is becoming essential to nonprofits. A notable use of video by nonprofits is the Invisible Children KONY 2012 video, which is nearing 100 million views on YouTube as of this writing and generated action from Congress and the African Union. However, most nonprofits don’t have the video or production quality to make a documentary. That doesn’t mean you can’t be producing videos - especially with the recent upgrades to Instagram and the development of Vine, short videos are now easily shared socially. And some nonprofits have already taken notice. In the final post of this series, we’ll focus on the best ways for your nonprofit to use video.

Whether it be moving pictures, compelling designs, or programming code - embracing design is important to the success of your nonprofit.

(Image provided by Flickr user juhansonin. Licensed under CC By-SA 2.0.)