Future Fundraising Now

That slideshow on your homepage? It probably doesn’t work

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by

Jeff Brooks
in

A lot of organizations manage to cram more content on their website homepage by putting content in rotating slideshows. I’ve thought for a while that this is a dumb way to manage content, and BeaconfireWire backs up those suspicions at Do slideshows work?

Apparently, the more slides in a homepage slideshow, the fewer clicks you get:

… the first slide … averaged clicks from about 1% of homepage views. The next slide would get about half as many. The next slide, half again. Beyond that, the click rate rapidly dwindled towards zero.

The takeaway: people might notice the first couple slides, but they’re not likely to click, and beyond that, no one is even seeing them.

If you want your homepage to generate views of important stuff on your website, you’re going to have to actually manage content, not just shuttle stuff into slideshows.

    Comments

    4 responses to “That slideshow on your homepage? It probably doesn’t work”

    1. Jacob Smith Avatar
      Jacob Smith

      Ahh finally something other than my notation that slideshows were a bad idea.

    2. Jacob Smith Avatar
      Jacob Smith

      Ahh finally something other than my notation that slideshows were a bad idea.

    3. John Brunsdon Avatar
      John Brunsdon

      Those figures are pretty similar to what we’ve found, and a reason we don’t recommend slideshows (at one large national heritage charity we looked at, for instance, the first slide in the slideshow on their old homepage was getting 98% of the clickthroughs, with the other three sharing the remaining 2%)
      We’ve found a more effective way to achieve the same aim (maximum content in minimum space) is to thumbnail off the alternative images – the main image will still get the most click love, but by previewing what else can be seen you can significantly increase engagement with the other content.

    4. John Brunsdon Avatar
      John Brunsdon

      Those figures are pretty similar to what we’ve found, and a reason we don’t recommend slideshows (at one large national heritage charity we looked at, for instance, the first slide in the slideshow on their old homepage was getting 98% of the clickthroughs, with the other three sharing the remaining 2%)
      We’ve found a more effective way to achieve the same aim (maximum content in minimum space) is to thumbnail off the alternative images – the main image will still get the most click love, but by previewing what else can be seen you can significantly increase engagement with the other content.

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    The future of fundraising is not about social media, online video, or SEM. It’s not about any technology, medium, or technique. It’s about donors. If you need to raise funds from donors, you need to study them, respect them, and build everything you do around them. And the future? It’s already here. More.

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    Jeff BrooksJeff Brooks has been serving the nonprofit community for more than 35 years and blogging about it since 2005. He considers fundraising the most noble of pursuits and hopes you’ll join him in that opinion. You can reach him at jeff [at] jeff-brooks [dot] com. More.

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    The future of fundraising is not about social media, online video, or SEM. It’s not about any technology, medium, or technique. It’s about donors. If you need to raise funds from donors, you need to study them, respect them, and build everything you do around them. And the future? It’s already here. More.

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    About the blogger

    Jeff Brooks has been serving the nonprofit community for more than 30 years and blogging about it since 2005. He considers fundraising the most noble of pursuits and hopes you’ll join him in that opinion. You can reach him at jeff [at] jeff-brooks [dot] com.