The number of nonprofit organizations is growing every year.
People today, are striving to make our world better. As per statistics, in America alone, $114 billion was donated to charity in 2017.
While there are thousands of nonprofit organizations, each serves a specific purpose. For example:
– The Red Cross handles emergency planning and management,
– The Care foundation raises money to provide Pakistani children with good education, and
– Let’s Do It! foundation manages large annual environmental events
However, if you convert your website into a native mobile app for Android and iOS, you will be able to reach more people.
Although there is no single recipe for the development of a nonprofit application, there are a few common elements that help these apps succeed.
In this post, we have created a list of tips for creating a top-notch app for nonprofit organizations.
How can apps solve issues of nonprofit organizations?
Nonprofit organizations often have limited budgets for any development. Therefore, you should carefully consider all the pros and cons of creating an app.
Let’s find out how a nonprofit organization can get advantages by creating an app:
1. Encourage donations
Creating an app for donations enables volunteers to do good deeds in just a few taps. It also encourages them to contribute more.
By recent statistics from Global Trends in Giving Report, about 54 percent of respondents prefer to donate online with a credit or debit card. That means, people tend to donate more via mobile.
2. Raise awareness
In older times, nonprofit organizations raised awareness by distributing flyers and going door to door, asking for donations.
Sending emails and SMS are still common ways to aware people but are losing popularity as an acquisition channel.
25 percent of volunteers use smartphones to discover nonprofit organizations these days. That way, building a mobile app makes it much easier for volunteers to find your organization online.
3. Engage with volunteers
A mobile app helps you retain volunteers and encourage them to contribute regularly. With many marketing strategies, you can turn volunteering into an exciting journey.
4. Manage large social events
Nonprofit organizations organize thousands of large social events every year, just to make people aware of the cause.
Creating an app for such events allows you to keep in touch with volunteers throughout the year and make them contribute regularly. With an app, people know each nitty-gritty of the events held by the organization. This helps you achieve maximum effectiveness.
What features make a great app for nonprofit organizations?
If you want to reap all the benefits of an application, think over details and find ways to attract and retain volunteers.
Here are the important things that you should carefully think through to make your organization prosper.
Phase 1: Design
1. Clear and user-friendly UI/UX
An app’s design is what makes a user uninstall it or continue exploring it. Therefore, make your app’s design simple and predictable. That way, users will not need to spend additional time figuring out how it works.
Here are the following tips for creating an appealing design:
– Place frequently used CTAs at the bottom of the screen where they can be easily reached.
– Choose decent colors for each action on your app. Every action should have a separate tab with a minimum of elements. However, going overboard with the design elements on a single page lets users uninstall it immediately.
– Get easy navigation that does not lead people astray.
2. Data visualization
As you will have a lot of data about transactions, donations, and user actions, you’ll need to measure the performance of your app.
Data visualization is useful for both app owners and app users. It is a convenient way to see how an app affected donations, awareness, and more for app owners.
App users, on the other hand, can be incentivized to take action and feel like part of a large movement.
Phase 2: Mobile app development
Tooling is an essential part of making your app the most optimized.
Here are several tips:
1. Choose APIs carefully
APIs or Application programming interfaces are handy solutions for common development cases, provided by large tech companies. APIs help in accelerating development and cutting costs.
2. Integrate a payment gateway
If you are creating a donation app, implementing a payment gateway is a must that ensures users can donate money effortlessly.
You can even allow users to donate via Google Pay, Apple Pay, credit or debit card, and PayPal for their convenience.
3. Ensure that the app works smoothly under high load
While there are lots of people who like to be a part of your cause, make sure that your app can handle a lot of users in real-time.
4. Provide device compatibility
If you want to increase your user base, make sure your app should run thoroughly on different devices.
5. Make your app responsive
Responsive design is vital for your mobile app. Ensure that your app works seamlessly on all mobile devices.
Phase 3: Turning users into enthusiastic volunteers
1. Onboarding
Onboarding helps decrease abandonment by displaying an app’s value right after it gets installed on any device. However, some users may be annoyed by onboarding or downloading an app for the second time. To solve this issue, you should allow users to skip onboarding.
2. Show gratitude for what volunteers do
Appealing mobile app design and good performance do not always guarantee that users will use your app regularly. In fact, it is the way you communicate with them.
The best way is to tell users how much you appreciate their good deeds.
3. Let users cooperate and compete
People want to be a part of smaller groups sharing the same interests or goals as well as being part of a great movement. For this reason, you should allow users to create and join teams.
In this way, the app develops a competitive spirit, encouraging volunteers to contribute more.
4. Gamification
Adding game mechanics to your app helps turn volunteering into a fun experience. For instance, you can integrate the achievement dashboard, which is the most common type of gamification for the nonprofit organization’s app.
With this dashboard, users will receive colorful badges or stickers once they do a certain action or number of actions. Such elements help increase enthusiasm and serve as an additional incentive to contribute.
5. Let users create their own events
Allow users to create their own events if your app handles large social events. This helps in increasing user engagement.
6. Help users organize their work
Integrating a calendar into the app makes sure users never forget about important events. Also, it helps users organize their events, such as a blood donation appointment. You can even implement push notifications to remind users about upcoming events.
A to-do list is another useful feature of the app that helps volunteers to complete a sequence of actions. With this feature, it becomes easier for them to see the scope of the work.
Phase 4: Reaching more people
Regardless of the appealing design and features, no user will download it if they do not know about it. That’s why you need to create a strategy for promoting your app besides creating it.
Nonprofit organizations have no budget for marketing, though. However, SMS marketing and word of mouth can be the best marketing channels for them to market their app.
For instance, let users share their experiences with friends on social channels.
How to make a remarkable app on a tight budget?
One of the main concerns here that stops nonprofit organizations from developing an app is money. Therefore, we have several tips for you. Have a look:
1. Find a reliable vendor
While nonprofit organizations are strict on their budget, they should carefully choose a mobile app development company with the best value for money. AppMySite Online app creator helps you build an Android app without coding with minimal cost, but with the quality.
2. Start with a minimum viable product
Creating a minimum viable product (MVP) means that you are developing the first version of your app. This version of the app is cost-optimized and has a cost minimum set of features.
3. Use convenient solutions
As we have already discussed how APIs can cut down development time and supply low costs, you can use a variety of libraries, frameworks, and APIs for common development problems. You do not need to reinvent the wheel for your product. You can choose APIs from well-known companies that have good documentation and support.
Consider creating an app now!
Building an app for a nonprofit entity, greatly depends on the organization itself.
We hope our tips will help you create an excellent app to engage thousands or even millions of people and change our world for the better.
If you are looking for mobile app development services, please contact us.
And, thanks for making our world a better place!