Success Stories

Growing a Web Presence in a Local Niche Market

How do you grow your web traffic and brand awareness in a local niche market? 

The Bowery Mission has been serving the homeless and hungry in New York since 1879. To continue to fulfill their purpose, The Bowery Mission needed a better way of managing their web presence to meet the needs of their core audience. As their vital year-end donation season approached, this was the challenge presented to Five Q and partner Douglass Shaw and Associates to make their web presence a success. 

Providing Passionate Care...on the Web

The Bowery Mission needed a customized and easily accessible system for updating their website content to keep visitors updated and draw them into further involvement with the organization. They also needed a robust system to communicate financial needs to donors. They wanted to allow donors to give through multiple channels—by phone, mail, planned gift, cash gifts, or online gifts—in a secure environment. 

For people seeking assistance from The Bowery Mission, it was important to provide assistance in getting personal help for themselves, friends, or family members. Therefore, the website needed to provide key information about qualifications for being served by The Bowery Mission, answer questions, and provide online forms and key contact information.

Finally, they needed a media area of the website for those seeking information about their local work. This media section would include key contact information, staff profiles, background information about The Bowery Mission, downloadable images, and other interactive media channels.

Flexible, Yet Still in Control

In response to these needs, Five Q partnered with Douglas Shaw & Associates to develop the new look and feel of the new website, a custom Content Management System (CMS), and added the functionality modules required to accomplish their strategic goals. Additionally, Five Q developed a Search Engine Strategy to boost their ranking and brand awareness on the web.

The CMS was the perfect platform for their redesigned website since it would create three different layers: design, content, and structure. Each layer would be integrated together but work independently of the others in the background. If there were changes made to the content, the visual design of the website would still maintain the same fonts and backgrounds to ensure the consistency of the content displayed.

Plus, for the staff maintaining the redesigned website, the CMS allowed them to make their updates from anywhere—as long as they have an Internet connection—through a secured website login page to publish their work directly to the web. Best of all, the CMS was designed for those without HTML or technical experience in mind, making it easy for anyone to learn how to make or schedule website changes.

With a growing online presence, Five Q provided an online donation system where visitors were now able to make secured, one-time donations to the ministry or become an ongoing donor through their monthly giving program. This allowed The Bowery Mission to have a greater reach and presence on the website, and draw in new potential donors that were passionate about their work.

Finally, by conducting research into keywords that potential website visitors were using to find their website as well as those of other niche organizations, Five Q provided content recommendations that strategically interspersed these keywords and phrases on the website. This would assist website search crawlers to better find and rank the website in search engine results pages, increasing their website presence.

Success Through Service (and Search)

Through the strategic placement of searchable keywords within the website content, The Bowery Mission website began placing higher in search engine results pages (SERP). Currently, it ranks second on a Google SERP for the phase "homeless in New York", making it easier for website visitors to find. The reports also show that 92% of these visitors are new to the website, averaging over 4 minutes spent on the website and visiting 4.5 pages.

By implementing the search engine content strategies on the redesigned website, traffic more than doubled within the first 60 days since the relaunch. Additionally, overall average time on the website has increased from 1.59 minutes to over 3 minutes (88% increase), and the average pages per visit increased from 2.95 to 3.76 (27% increase).

The increased traffic also had a direct impact on the number of donations. Since the relaunch in late 2010, The Bowery Mission has averaged 13 donations per day, for a total of over 1800 donations to date and climbing. Also, traffic to the donation pages specifically has risen 7.6% overall, with larger increases during the holiday giving season.

Utilizing the customized CMS has allowed The Bowery Mission to more easily make website changes to meet their visitors needs. This implementation, coupled with the success of search engine and online donation efforts have allowed this organization to continue to grow and reach out to those most in need of their services.