Case Study

ServeNebraska

NONPROFIT WEBSITE, PORTALS, EVENT REGISTRATIONS, SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, ONLINE DONATIONS

Time is money. With a new website, they saved both.

ServeNebraska encourages community involvement by coordinating and supporting community members in their volunteer efforts. ServeNebraska coordinates AmeriCorps programming, which celebrates volunteer achievements through annual awards, provides training and technical assistance for AmeriCorps, and makes sure that those with disabilities have the opportunity to be fully involved.

ServeNebraska struggled to attract new donors for two big annual fundraising campaigns: Give to Lincoln and Community Services Fund.

Their other challenge: managing their website. With their previous website provider, they would have to wait 24–36 hours to see a content change or update made on their site. While they paid a low monthly fee, it didn’t include the cost to make updates throughout the year, which totaled more than $8,000.

Once ServeNebraska unveiled their new Firespring website, they immediately saw an uptick in traffic. Overall, Firespring helped to elevate their brand with a more professional-looking site, eliminated their outdated website content and created a more attractive, engaging online presence for their donors that they can now maintain and optimize without the need for a web developer, programmer or unnecessary third party.

Firespring’s user-friendly CMS (content management system) called the Springboard gave ServeNebraska the power and authority to make changes and updates with point-and-click simplicity and create new webpages without going through a gatekeeper. The ability to change content at a moment’s notice and immediately see it happen—all on their own and in real time—saved the organization both time and money.

They also adopted the use of portals, a password-protected area that allowed them to provide news and information to their members without hassle or worrying that important messages were getting lost in people’s inboxes. Portals are helpful for communicating with members, board members, volunteers or any group you’d like to provide a private space.

“Our cost to change our website previously was $80 an hour, and factoring in a staff member building the page first at $25 an hour, we have divided our costs in half. The selling factor for Firespring was the convenience, the control of our content and the extras that we receive: the portals, online registration and soon the use of sending out a newsletter from one site.”

—Cathleen Plager, Executive Director of ServeNebraska