Unless you’ve been in a deep sleep for the past five years, you know that it’s important for your organization to be on social media. Social media has been especially helpful to nonprofits, NGOs, and social enterprises – helping them connect with larger audiences than they ever have before. By leveraging their creativity, many organizations have managed to find success using social media at minimal to no cost.

However, as beneficial as social media is, it’s still no substitute for a well-designed website. So before you make your online strategy all about social media, here are some reasons why your online strategy needs to start with your website:

• Home base for information about your organization: When a potential supporter wants to learn about your organization, their first stop will be a search engine. The nature of search engines is to list website sources first and before any other sources. Make it easy for potential donors, volunteers, and other supporters to find you by having a dedicated website.
• All social media profiles lead back to it: One of the identifying pieces of information social media sites ask from user accounts is their website URL. The purpose of asking this is to direct social media user’s back to your see website for more as will be explained below.
• Websites do not impose the limitations found on social media platforms: Twitter has a 140 character limit and the Facebook has a 63,206 character limit. The suggested ideal message character limit is even shorter: 100 characters for Twitter and 40 characters for Facebook. That’s very few characters for communicating your story and mission. On your website, the sky is the limit. You can post as much as you’d like of written, visual, video, and audio content to get your message out.
• Websites support your fundraising goals by making donations possible: Facebook and YouTube offer fundraising tools but those are currently limited to a select number of organizations. Nonprofits and NGOs can sign up to fundraise through those social networks, but neither has announced when the feature will be open to all nonprofits and NGOs. Alternately, there are fundraising apps that work on social networks but they do have a cost. If you need to raise money now and minimize your overhead, then that’s all the more reason to have your own website. You can work with your website developer to build direct donation features into your website and starts raising funds now.

Social media matters to your organization’s online strategy but it shouldn’t be the only part of your online strategy. Build your online strategy by with a well-designed website serving as the hub of everything you do on social media.

For an idea of what’s possible with a well-designed website, check out some of the work we’ve done for nonprofits, government agencies, and startups.