0:00  
I want to welcome you all, to this session where we're talking about neon websites. This session is called Create personalization and connection to neon websites. We're so glad you're here. Let me go ahead and introduce myself. I am Allison Gelman, my pronouns are she hers. I'm a product manager for neon websites and events. I've spent 10 years in the nonprofit world as a project manager and administrator, including running the website at my nonprofit organizations that I was at. I joined Neon one this summer, and I'm so excited to be working on this product. All right, and we also have Sam Nyland. Her pronouns are she hers. She's the Product Marketing Manager works closely with the product management team sales marketing teams, across many boundaries there across many departments to bring our neon one product releases and features to life. And you can find her hosting product webinars, very similar to this one. Alright, so just some quick housekeeping as we're getting started, please make sure to keep yourself on mute. We do love to hear from you. But this session, we're gonna go quick, and we have a lot of ground to cover. So use the chat to post the questions, we'll be seeing them we'll be watching them, Sam, just common to chat here. And if we have time, we're going to circle around to a q&a right at the end. And I also want to remind you that there's a closed captioning button that you can use if you need, it's a little CC button, with the five of them that are at the bottom of your screen. Alright, so now we're gonna dive in. So this session is an introduction to the new neon websites platform. We'll start off by giving you a bit of backstory on why Neon one is introducing new websites platform and to tell you a bit about the future of what we'll bring out in our full product suite. And this is all part of our Connected strategy, which we're really going to dive into and talk about. From there, we're going to take a look at a few professionally designed practice nonprofit templates that our team has created. And last but not least, we're going to we will explore the back builder design capabilities, widgets and new ways that neon websites can help your organization. So first off, what is the reasoning behind the launch of the new neon websites platform, we're really going to sort out the problem. Alright, so this is the next generation for neon websites. It's a replacement for our existing Web Studio product. And we're really focusing on a content management system that allows us to zero in on content and how we can update and create new content for our customers, our clients and their websites. We're going to spend time and attention focused on building your brands, you can focus on your back end, and you'll be able to better connect to your stakeholders and engage your audience in new ways. Content is really a core focus of neon one and part of our Connected ecosystem. So speaking of this connected ecosystem immediately followed, following this session, Nolan is going to be presenting on the all neon one ecosystem that really is going to present the vision and strategy on this and really dig in on our Connected strategy, which focuses on intelligence content and automation. Intelligence is basically the ability to communicate with our customers so that you can make choices faster and better. Automation is how do we automate? How do we eliminate burdens of administrative workflows and anything manual. But content is really where neon websites fits. And that's really where we're going to share and drive our customer visions. Okay, so let's see ran on this problem. So we really have limited staff and volunteers. This is a major problem in the nonprofit sector, especially in small to mid sized nonprofit organizations. I can assume that many of you wear many hats for your organization's I know, that's definitely how that goes. There's also no money allocated for designing and building a website.

4:20  
There's limited skills, resources and knowledge surrounding websites and web development, let alone a dedicated staff member for this type of role. And last but not least, there's just not enough time in the day to build design and manage a website in an effective way. Because we all know there's a billion other things to do. So what's the solution? Boom, neon websites it's the ideal solution is a turnkey solution. A platform like neon websites is easy to use, meaning there's no need for a web developer. Neon websites is easy to build, maintain and launch. You don't need to know any coding or any design whatsoever, we have created a solution that will give you the freedom and confidence to build, design and manage your website without the heavy lift of your time. We also have created a solution that's affordable, it's a big deal. On top of that the solution integrates into your Ne- neon one product. So now I'm going to hand it over to Sam to discuss some of the product website best practices.

5:30  
Awesome. Thank you, Allison. Yes, so we're going to start part one, today discussing just that nonprofit website best practices. So let's go ahead and actually dive right in. So there are just kind of a laundry list here. But there are quite a few things to consider when thinking about building a website specifically for your nonprofit organization. So starting with investing in a nonprofit CMS or nonprofit specific website. Secondly, responsive design, meaning your website will be compatible with mobile devices, or the ever growing kind of number devices of devices. Fast page loading time, we've all been there getting frustrated because the page won't load fast enough. And we wonder if we're still using dial up. It's a fact fast websites simply convert better. And then we want to make sure of course that we're protected. So strong website security. So what that means is, is things like hosting security certificates, any updates, site back that's to the websites, neon websites actually takes care of all of that for you. And then ADA accessibility, which means creating websites that individuals can access regardless of disability. Neon websites has built in platform features like keyboard navigation, internalization, and compliance automation tools that will actually help you build an accessible website optimized for SEO. So for those of you that that don't know, SEO stands for search engine optimization, so you're likely wanting to increase traffic to your website. So SEO will be a top priority. So I actually have a Link, I think Allison will actually go ahead and put this in the chat. But my colleague Alex actually just wrote a blog post yesterday on the top 10 kind of tips for optimizing your website's SEO, specific for nonprofit organizations. So feel free to go take a look at that up next intuitive or easy to use navigation. It sounds like a no brainer. However, clear navigation is really able to establish a content hierarchy, and will help guide visitors essentially from point A to point B on your website. And then engagement opportunities. So really helping your supporters your website visitor visitors be able to engage with you online. So having many different options, like an interest form, social media, newsletter, signup, can really help your organization reach more supporters through their preferred channels. And then standardize branding across the website. So this holds true from things like font standardization colors, but it also applies to any of your forms. So that can hold true for your donation form, your membership form, and that registration form. And then using impactful photos and storytelling. So really, I mean, using evocative imagery, your photos can instantly resonate and bring up powerful emotions with your site visitors. I'm a huge believer in impact storytelling, using that throughout your website to really make that connection between your work and your community, or the people you serve. Or the animals that you protect. Prominent CTAs so clear, clear calls to action, meaning clear, donate buttons if you're a fundraising driven organization, which I can assume many of you are clear and prominent buttons where a member can come and join or renew their membership, register for an event. And then lastly, integrating your website and your CRM. So between email communication, online donations, membership joins, your organization will likely be receiving a lot of data that is flowing through your website. And it also needs to live inside of your neon or your or your CRM, specifically neon CRM. So having your website as well as your CRM, connected, you'll actually eliminate the need for any, you know, outside manual data management, which of course, we all know is extremely time consuming. So let's actually go ahead and take a look at how neon CRM connects with neon websites.

So here, we actually have an example of our events platform. And I'm going to talk a little bit about how our events, data inside of neon CRM can be dynamically pushed to neon websites. So the web builder inside of neon, the neon websites platform has dynamic pages, built for both events, as well as fundraising campaigns, which we'll touch on next. So this here is just an example of a dynamic events page taken from our demo site, the Agloe Nature Center. And you'll see here, it's pulling in the name of the event under upcoming events. It's also pulling in data fields like the date, the location, the logo of the event, the event description, and it's also actually pulling in the registration form here as well. So this is really impactful, it reduces the amount of work that you're doing, just either inside this, the CRM as well as the website, as it is dynamically pushing out. And up next, we have, as you can see here, our web builder also has a dynamic page and data collection for fundraising campaigns inside of neon CRM. We can see here to our left, we have all of our currently active fundraising campaigns that are being pulled directly from Neon CRM. And then over to our right, you'll take a look at a more granule granular level of our Giving Tuesday campaign. So it's actually pulling in data fields from the CRM displaying the of course the event name, total donations, the goal amount for the actual fundraising campaign, total money that the campaign has received thus far. And then of course, direct links to the fundraising campaign donation form. And then as we can see other ways to perhaps contribute to the organization. So now that we have covered the nonprofit profit, best website best practices, let's go ahead and take a look at what the current neon CRM or the professionally designed what nonprofit templates that we have created on our end. So we actually designed a set of templates through neon website that are research backed, professionally designed templates, with the underlying belief that all nonprofit websites should inspire supporters. We should inform visitors about your organization, of course, and then make an impact and through visual storytelling. So we've this is just kind of the theory and kind of the philosophy in terms of how we have created these types of templates. So I'm going to click in now to our display site to showcase some of our templates. So we have a variety of mission driven and mission specific templates, as you can see here, that kind of get you started on on your journey. So taking a look at different mission driven organizations and different templates that perhaps resonate with your organization. So if of course, you're you're more of an education focused Foundation, perhaps take a look at the Education Scholarship Fund template, I'm actually going to jump into our animal welfare template here, just to take a quick look. And Allison, if you don't actually mind popping a link to this display site so folks can poke poke around. One cool thing that we have set up is that we have the responsive design that we can take a look at right away here. So again, what that means is we're able to take a look at our our website on many different devices. So I can actually scroll here on my browser view. The same holds true for the tablet view, and then of course, our mobile device here. Another thing that you can do within these templates, just to explore is being able to take a look at various areas here. So I'm actually going to pop this out into the full screen just so we can get an idea. So again, this is our animal welfare template. We built it with some evocative imagery here. So of course all of our very, very cute animal because we have edit editing areas and kind of different prompts to guide you in terms of where you can fill out different pieces of information. So for this one, we have events we have about the organization, our work or impact, and how we help.

I can pop out the home navigation bar here to dive into perhaps you know, different areas within the template itself, just to get an understanding of of how my are kind of envision how my website may look.

So heading back into our slide deck here, in part three of today's conversation, I'm going to talk a little bit about how we can create personalized experiences for your website visitors and organization supporters with me on websites. So first, we're going to talk a little bit about really kind of what personalization or website personalization is. So personalization is actually accomplished by changing site messaging, content, and some design aspects based on a visitor's geographical location, time of day, number of previous visits to the website. So you're able to create create unique experiences, things like pop ups can be triggered. Things like videos can be triggered, based off of some of those triggers like geographical location. So I have two examples here. The first one is an example of two rules that I've set up. So this is my screenshot of my kind of fake organization, the studio Sam foundation. So what I've done for my neon website, is that I've created a rule. So if a visitor comes to my website, the studio Sam foundation for the first time, it is going to pop up a display video, which is our storytelling, our impact video. So maybe this is a one or two minute video, diving into the vision and the mission of the organization. I've also set up another rule, if a site visitor comes to the site a second time, it then displays a contact form. So it's going to pop up a form similar to this, that will give a little synopsis of hey, we're happy to see you happy to see you coming again and visiting our site. Perhaps you you'd like to fill out this interest form to gather more information about the studio Sam foundation. Up next, this was one of my favorites. Taking a look at some of the personalization rules. What I've created here is that I've I've triggered a rule based on a specific date. And this date, of course, is November 29, which is giving Tuesday. So the rule that I've set up is that if a visitor comes to the studio, Sam Foundation website on November 29, it will add falling hearts to the site and promote the GivingTuesday campaign. So these are just really fun personalization, kind of rules and things that can be set up in neon websites. And I mean, the world's it's pretty awesome, because there's many different triggers that can be set up, and those are unlimited. So talking just a bit about why personalization matters. We all honestly seem to have a short attention spans these days, I know I do. So it's a great way to help attract your supporters. In a fun and innovative way. It's also going to help you in your organization boost engagement and boost conversion online. Your supporters also want the information that they're looking for quickly. So being able to set up different triggers based on perhaps a mobile device versus someone visiting your website on a browser or displaying certain types of information to a person who has visited your website 10 times or for the 10th time versus a person who's coming as a first time visitor. So in part three, or part four of today's brief kind of walk through an introduction to neon websites, we're actually going to take a sneak peek into the builder itself. So I'm going to exit out of here and quickly bring up our

neon websites, editors interface is what we'll call this. So I'm just going to kind of walk through a little bit of an orientation or kind of a high level overview of kind of what we're looking at here. So as mentioned, this is what I would like To call the editors interface, and really, it has three predefined sections, we have the top navigation bar, we have the content area here, which we'll dive into a little bit more. And then I have my kind of left panel over here, which actually contains all of my editing tools and widgets. So starting within the navigation bar up here at the top, this area is important because it allows me to actually move between different pages on my website that I built out, it also allows me to take a look and preview my website on different devices. So again, I can come in here, take a look from a browser view, the iPad or tablet view, this is kind of fun, rather than just the Apple phone, it actually gives you the option for viewing that on an Android phone, I can come here to go back to my editor. And then it also has controls for undoing certain content. And then saving and updating my changes here as well. So I'm gonna go to back to my homepage here. And we'll go to this view, of course. So just diving into this content area. So in this space, I'm actually able to move and edit different features, such as, of course, photo images, different text imagery here. So I'll just scroll through just to give a brief kind of look at what we're working with. So it's as simple as perhaps clicking into this image, maybe I want to, you know, change or update this image. So from here, I actually can go ahead and replace this image. So neon websites has a built in library filled with stock imagery. However, you also has to have the capability to upload of course, your own high resolution photos, which I highly suggest in terms of you know, if it is you know, real photos that you're taking of your your programming or certain events and things like that, we can also upload Vector Art and imagery that way as well, I'm simply going to search here, so maybe I want to search for paint painting. So I can take a look. Maybe I really liked the look at this picture, I can simply select. And we can come in here. And we do have a variety of editing capabilities as it pertains to the size of the photo, we can change, you know, the colors, I've added in kind of this slight border here. So I can simply come in and kind of move that around, I can change the color of my my border if I'd like. We can add different animation styles to an image as well. So you know your your fade in or fade out different fun things like that, I'm just going to leave this one as is. And then over on my design panel here, I do want to point out that there is the capability to make kind of global changes. So you will want to set up like global changes that pertain to consistency on your website. So for example, I've created my header text. So anytime I put in a header on any of my pages, it's going to have this epilogue font, versus if I am adding in a paragraph, type text area. I'm want this Laura font in black at, you know, font size 20. So neon websites does come with a ton of different font capabilities. But you also have the ability to upload your own custom fonts as well.

I made sure that my logo is displayed throughout the website as well. We can also update the way that kind of our navigation is laid out. So I have more of this, Hey, this three pronged approach where it is now layering out my pages. So I have my homepage, I have K through 12 programs, as well as adult and senior programs that live on my website. And then I've built pages that nest within some of these pages here as well. So taking a look at the pages, we can actually see that hierarchy hierarchy excuse me listed here with my homepage, my K through 12 programs, my nested pages that live here and I know we're coming up on time here, so just want to run through and a few widgets. Because widgets are actually going to be the building blocks of your site. We have kind of frequently used widgets are your frequent, frequently used widgets that we'll live in populate here at the top popular ones like text image, things that we can simply drag and drop into the website. So basic information and kind of widgets here. So if we're, you know, entering in, you know, maybe a three column approach to different textboxes media widgets. So if I want to insert perhaps like an image slider, or if I want to actually add in like a photo gallery, which maybe this isn't the exact best part, but maybe I want to add that right here. So it's already populating with some images. And again, just as we saw before, I can simply come in. I can search for images, add new images here as well. There's a lot of other widgets as they pertain to like social widgets. So I can add in my my social media links, I can add in a map. So this is especially helpful on perhaps and About Us page, hey, we're located here, contact us. So easily dropping in the map, putting in the address, things of that nature, adding in our Twitter feed, adding in our, you know, our Facebook, things like that. And then, as we mentioned before, neon websites is able to really help personalize the experience. So I created kind of that first time visitor here. So what I did is, Hey, first time visitor or second time visitor, will this be able to see XYZ contact form versus the first time visitor, which I have, which will be displayed kind of that that video content. So I know we're coming up on time here. I do want to make sure that folks are Allison, I'm sure you've probably been manning the chat. But just wanted to see if we did have any questions.

26:55  
We haven't had any come in, but like Sam just mentioned, please send them in. We have about two minutes left. So go ahead and type them in quick.

27:04  
Yeah. Um, yeah, I will say like we really breezed through this really quickly, we only had a half hour kind of session today. But really, this is just an introductory to Hey, this is our vision for neon websites. And we're super excited to be showcasing kind of the regeneration of this this product. So be on the lookout for upcoming webinars and information. If you're interested in taking a look in a deeper dive, we do have more information on the neon one website related directly to our offering.

27:47  
Michelle, thank you for the comments. Yeah, we're we're definitely paying attention to our small nonprofits. Sam, she wrote, thank you for sharing. We're a very small nonprofit looking to grow and better represent ourselves.

27:59  
Yeah, fantastic. Michelle, I think, yeah, if you're interested in you know, if you have a current website, or you're looking to build one or rebrand, neon websites is a great and affordable option. Our subscription pricing is actually $49 a month. And we do offer services to help you build your entire site. I personally don't know any type of coding or web, HTML, anything. And I went in and started playing around. And it's actually super fun. It's very fun to build out. And we have a lot of great tools. We also are, we also have tons of like innovations coming down the pipeline as well within our neon websites roadmap.

28:51  
So I know we're at time, but I really want to end with some gratitude. Thank you, Sam. Thank you, everyone, for attending. We had a really strong healthy attendance here. And please be on the lookout. I posted Sam and my email address in the chat. We'd love to hear from you guys. And yeah, thank you, Michelle. We're definitely thinking about you and your organization's and really trying to pay attention to our needs.

29:19  
Yeah, thank you, everybody. Thanks so much for joining. And yes, as Allison mentioned, I mean, please do not hesitate to reach out with with any questions that you have about neon websites. We're happy to help and I look forward to talking with you and have a great rest of your generosity exchange.

29:36  
Thank you, everyone.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai