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| Path: Main Street : Resources & Library : Research Articles : Feature Article |
Why did NetAid fail to raise more money from the visitors to its Web site?
By Graham Francis
1. Did the NetAid Web site really fail?
2. How did it fail?
2.1 How the NetAid site failed to cultivate its audience...
2.2 ...and failed to walk out with the money
3. Why did the NetAid site fail?1 Did the NetAid Web site really fail?
Tens of thousands attended the NetAid rock concerts in London, New York and Switzerland. Over a billion people worldwide were able to listen to it on their radios or TVs. Millions logged on to the Internet and watched internationally-known performers such as Bono and David Bowie sing live. And thanks to the heavy media coverage in the weeks preceding last October's concerts, millions more knew about the UN-sponsored series of anti-poverty concerts. On the night, everything worked faultlessly, and the following day the organizers were trumpeting their success in attracting more than 40 million hits to their Web site, and were looking at a raft of positive reviews.
A month later, the story was different. Newspapers across the world were reporting that 'Sponsors bail out NetAid rock flop' (1), or that 'NetAid Viewers Enjoyed the Concerts, Failed to Donate' (2). These stories seem to have been prompted by a Washington Post article revealing that, although NetAid's two corporate sponsors had between them donated $11 million, the organization had only managed to raise the 'spectacularly meagre' amount of $1 million in concert revenues and online donations. (3)
Promoter Ken Kragen, who also promoted Live Aid in 1985 - which raised $120 million for famine relief - explained the failure to the Washington Post this way:
"In '85, people were seeing pictures [of starving Africans] on the news for the first time... Now, we're seeing a disaster a week, whether it's the earthquake in Turkey, or East Timor or the plane crash in Mexico. People have gotten used to it, unfortunately".
This explanation of some sort of compassion fatigue is absolute rubbish and Kragen should be ashamed of himself. Two examples are enough to illustrate. During last year's Kosovo crisis, the US Red Cross was raising $1 million a month in online credit card donations alone (4). And the UN Hunger Site has regularly seen over 300,000 people a day donating cups of food to famine-stricken areas of the world, simply by clicking on a button (5). These examples also demonstrate there is no reason why people refuse to donate large sums of money or take the trouble to help a charity over the Internet per se - and both received substantially less publicity than did NetAid.
Quite simply, NetAid failed to raise money because the designers of its Web site, in simply transposing the lessons of commercial sites to the non-profit sector, did not fully appreciate the sometimes radical differences between the two.
First, though, I would like to quantify the extent of the NetAid site's 'failure'. How many people logged on? Mark Seacombe of the UK newspaper The Observer reported that it was 'up to a billion people - one sixth of humanity' (6). However, as already stated, the day after the concerts, NetAid reported that there had been over 40 million 'Web hits' (7). And last November's Washington Post article quoted 2.3 million hits. In the absence of any data from NetAid itself, I would guess that the wildly varying numbers are due to a misunderstanding about what 'hits' are, and to Mark Seacombe misreading his press release. 'Hits', the amount of data passing through web servers, are a wildly inaccurate method of measuring visitors to a Web site. A more realistic guide would be to take the number of web streams broadcast on the day - around 2.5 million according to NetAid - to reveal the minimum number of visitors to the site. It's also reasonable to assume that perhaps a million more logged on to the NetAid site but either were not interested in viewing the concert or lacked the correct plugins.
NetAid have also not made available the figures for average donations. These are likely to be relatively high - the American Red Cross report that their average on-line credit card donation is around $127 (8), while other reports have shown that Internet credit card donations tend to be 15 to 20 per cent higher than billed amounts (9). Certainly, the audience attracted to the NetAid site were in the demographic that nonprofit organizations consider most likely to donate online - according to Nielsen NetRatings, 82.3 per cent of those accessing NetAid were in the 25 to 49 age group (10). However, even if the average donation were only $10, this still means that only 100,000 of some 3.5 million visitors - around 3 per cent - donated anything at all. For a site which was the only source of the charity's fundraising, and to which many people must have come expressly to donate, this does indeed seem 'meagre'.
So, people knew about NetAid. People were interested in NetAid. People logged onto the Web site to investigate. But not enough of these were persuaded to donate. Why?
2. How did NetAid fail?
The NetAid Web site (http://www.netaid.org) was designed by KPMG, one of the world's largest management consulting companies and self-proclaimed 'leading Internet integrator in the marketplace', and used the technical knowhow of Cisco Systems, who are second only to Microsoft in the US mega-computer companies stakes.
Technically, the site is superb. It loads fast and faultlessly, and can cope easily with huge levels of demand. Cisco Systems report that on the day of the concerts the site (set up in only 90 days and which Cisco call "the largest Web site ever developed in terms of scale" (11)) was able to provide over 99% successful page downloads and Web stream connections.
The site passes with flying colours many of the standard tests used to gauge the success of a Web site. To build a good site, say the Funders Online Web site as well as many others, 'a simple and logical architecture is absolutely essential... information should be easy to find and access, ideally just two or three clicks away... make browsing as intuitive as possible' (12). NetAid has this - virtually every page contains links to other parts of the site, while different sections and subsections of the site are clearly demarcated, both thematically and visually. It would be virtually impossible to get lost in the site.
Funders Online also emphasize the graphic design and layout of a site, and its 'solidity' - in NetAid, the graphics are extremely professional; picture files and page sizes are small and help minimize download time; navigation and vital information is kept 'above the fold' of the Web page, and the site works well in a wide variety of browsers, both new and old.
Howard Lake, founder and manager of the UK Fundraising Web site, adds further criteria for a site's success. He writes that 'the site must be fully integrated into the charity's strategic plan and overall fundraising strategy' (13). NetAid had no problem with this - indeed, the Web site and new media's expanding opportunities for communication were central components of its strategic plan. This was well communicated through the media, both traditional and new. The site had a strong 'brand', with a logical sitename (netaid.org) and the NetAid logo on every page.
Which leaves us with the issue of content. There is near-unanimous agreement that in the charity sector, content is the overriding criterion for success of a Web site. "Most Web sites should be about content... you can't really put a price on content", argues Michael Stein, Internet consultant to the Support Center for Nonprofit Management. (14). Howard Lake writes that '[w]eb page content is more important than visual appearance: plan your content to include compelling information' (15).
Funders Online goes one step back and instructs that 'before deciding on content, the following questions should be answered: Who is your audience? What are the information needs of your audience? What would be the added value of the Web site?' (16).
Understanding the character and needs of your target audience is indeed key to any type of successful communication. Yet to concentrate solely on addressing the 'information needs' of this audience, as the Funders Online advice seems to suggest, risks not adequately addressing the environment this information is part of. And this environment is essential in shaping the relationship between the producers of a Web site and their audience. If the Web environment is misjudged, the audience is alienated and switches off, and flits off to find a site which engages them personally. If the environment is right, users become emotionally involved in the site, they feel the site is addressing their needs and interests, and stay tuned.
This is much easier said than done, particularly if you're building a charity site. As Jeff Hallett, director of the nonprofit sector practice at AppNet, says, "It's one thing to develop a relationship with people so they'll buy a product, and another to get them to give you money just to feel good" (17).
Creating the right environment is of particular importance if the aim of your charity site is not just to inform people about an issue, it's also to make them care more. It is also important if you wish to follow this up by asking people to demonstrate their commitment by donating their time or money.
Eric Miller of the Philanthropy News Network urges the creators of charity sites to '[k]eep in mind who it is that comes to your site, and why. Rarely do people get on the Internet in order to give a donation... Fundraising online shares many of the characteristics of fundraising off-line. You must still cultivate your donors, you must still ask and you must still walk out with the money' (18).
The NetAid site failed to cultivate its potential donors by not understanding their needs and thus not providing them with the right environment. For this reason - along with others - it also failed to walk out with the money.
2.1 How the NetAid site failed to cultivate its audience
What had the visitors to the NetAid site come to see? Well, they would have expected the concert broadcast, for one. A means of donating money. Some information about NetAid itself, perhaps, and the charity's concerns. But they probably had few other preconceptions.
When they got to the homepage, they were faced with what was essentially an index of the site's five main sections - About NetAid, What Works, What's New, Take Action and The Concert. The titles of these sections are prosaic, as are the subtitles ('Meryl Streep on Hunger', 'Saving the Environment'), and overall create a text-heavy and 'worthy' impression of the site as a whole. Although the faces in the middle of the page add some human element, there's no explanation about who they are or what they're doing - overall, there's no focus to the page, no dynamism, no excitement. There's nothing to engage the average surfer on their way to watch the concert. And more importantly, there's no overall message for them to take with them. 'Take Action'. Over what? 'What Works?'. For whom? There seems little chance that anyone will return to the homepage, as there does not seem to be anywhere worth exploring, or that much fun to be had on the site. And, as the message has been ignored, there is every danger that people will come away with little awareness of what NetAid is all about.(19)
It is worth pausing here to note that, thanks to the text-heaviness of the site and lack of icons, NetAid have probably already lost most of their non-English-speaking audience. For a site supposed to celebrate diversity and inform and educate people the world over about poverty in the developing world, to not include even cursory explanations of NetAid in the core UN languages of French, Spanish and Arabic is not just an oversight, it gives the site a very damaging US-centric feel.
Those who do go on to visit the 'What Works' section are faced with a choice of seven or eight essays on a variety of themes covering the liberal non-governmental spectrum, from ending hunger to securing human rights and relieving debt. These essays give general overviews of the concerns, and are obviously intended more to motivate the average visitor than to inform them in any detail. Yet they are pitched at a level too high for a casual visitor with no knowledge of the area - they are mainly theoretical and shy away from hard-hitting real-life cases of people affected by drought, for example, or by their country's debt repayments - and too low for anyone who wants to know the deeper causes of the problems, or what NetAid will do about them. For instance, the section about human rights, while essentially accurate, talks in the motivational platitudes of NGO-speak - there is nothing new or unique to NetAid here, neither is there any chance to get deeper into the theme, nor is there any indication that NetAid has the appropriate expertise to address the problems which it raises.
Overall, there is no impression of any community to the site as it stands, and very little to encourage people to feel that NetAid is a cause worth being passionate about. The site is faceless. These limitations seem to be acknowledged by Cisco System's statement that, although the site was primarily 'designed for Webcasting, to handle large-scale traffic from the concerts and connect millions of people around the globe', it would eventually evolve 'to include diverse functionality and rich content'. Cisco propose that, in future, people will be able to download multimedia kits covering issues of concern to NetAid, and be able to 'share ideas and information through chats with development experts around the world'.
Yet how much more would have been donated if an international chatroom had already been set up alongside the webcast, so people could exhort each other to give money and make each other feel they were part of a global cause? Or if the concert's performers had gone on-line themselves to persuade people of the worth of NetAid's fight against poverty? Or if those affected by poverty in the developing world had been interviewed on-line or been able to tell their stories to a captive audience of millions? As it was, even though millions of people may have been visiting the same Web site at the same time, there was no way they could know this, or share their common cause. NetAid managed to squander what was in fact its greatest asset - the visitors to its site.
2.2 How NetAid failed to walk out with the money
However, the failure of the site to raise money goes beyond its failure to create a sense of community or shared cause within its audience. The designers seem to have largely overlooked how easy it is for people to make excuses not to donate money. I'd like to deal with several of these excuses here.
- "I can't see where to give money"
Howard Lake praises the Friends of the Earth Web site (www.foe.org) for including on every page a hyperlink to the 'Join Friends of the Earth' page, which contains a direct appeal and a 'lift letter' from Jonathan Porrit.(20) This is obviously important, and NetAid has followed suit. No matter where you are on the NetAid site, you are never more than a click away from the donations section. However, this exhortation to donate is not given nearly enough prominence, appearing in the same font type and size as all the other indexed parts of the site.
- "I'll give them money later"
There's a story - possibly apocryphal - that when the American Red Cross changed its plea from 'Donate' to 'Donate Now', the number of donations doubled. Certainly, that's what its site (www.redcross.org) asks on its homepage at the moment - it's also worth noting the prominence of the link in relation to that on the NetAid site.
- "What do I get out of it?"
If you haven't managed to persuade people to donate on the basis that your cause is worthwhile, you could always bribe them. This would have been particularly easy to do in the case of NetAid. 'Donate and get a free and exclusive downloadable track by George Michael'. 'Donate and get a free screensaver'. 'Donate and get 10% off your next purchase at Virgin Megastore online'. 'Donate and get access to our backstage celebrity chatroom'. And so on.
In NetAid's favour, they do say you can get a "New Day" CD free with your NetAid Platinum Visa. Encouraging people to apply for a platinum credit card in order to help alleviate world debt? Nice idea.
- "It's too much trouble"
This is the difficult one. You need to remind people at every stage that what they are about to do is a Good Thing so that they don't lose heart halfway through. The NSPCC have clearly thought this through, and the donations section of their Web site - www.nspcc.org - is an excellent example of how to move people to give money. On the first click into the donations section, you get a sensitive account of the problems of child abuse, with well-judged stories from victims and details of how your donation will help. On your next click, you are presented with a credit card donation form, above which is written 'Yes, I would like to help the NSPCC end child abuse for ever'. This reminds the visitor to the site of the integrity of the charity and the cause, and is a direct prompt to affirmative action.
In contrast, potential NetAid donors are faced with a bland 'Give' page which only gives links to other sections, and no details at all of why you should give money. This page is so badly thought out it almost acts as disincentive to give anything at all to the charity.
- "I don't know what to do"
Donating money over the Internet is an inherently alienating and uncertain experience. You do not know the process beforehand, and each site's method of giving is different. If anything goes wrong, who do you contact? What do you do? How long will the process take? How much will be asked of you? If potential donors start to panic, it is very easy for them to hit the 'back' button on their browser and forget the whole transaction.
None of the sites examined are particularly good at coping with these fears, especially not in comparison to online shopping sites such as the Go airlines site (www.go-fly.com), www.lastminute.com, or, in particular, British Airways(21). These sites take you by the hand and guide you through the whole unknown process, making it as transparent as possible.
- "I don't trust online credit card donations"
A September 1999 CMS Interactive study on 'Prospects for Online Philanthropy and Activism' found that for almost a third of the group surveyed, a Web site's credit card security statement was "one of the most important" considerations when making online donations to charity. Nearly half (47%) said they are "extremely" concerned about maintaining their privacy during online transactions, with another quarter (25%) "very" concerned.(22)
Fears about credit card security only heighten any unease already felt by potential donors about the donation process as a whole. For people to give freely, charities must be explicit about their levels of security. The American Red Cross spell out that donations are secure several times on their initial 'donate' page, although they fail to include any information about security on the donation form itself. NetAid's visible concessions to security are the link to the 'secure online donation form', and a section in 'Frequently Asked Questions' which would be easy to miss. Again, on the donations form itself, there is no mention of the security of transmitting your credit card details, only an assurance that 'your name and personal information will not be sold or shared without your express consent'. To have added a reassurance about the integrity of the payment system, with a link to the FAQ page, would have cost nothing, and may have put more people's minds at rest.
In addition, the format of the NetAid 'Give Form' has no consistency with the rest of the site. This is presumably because it is hosted elsewhere - but it adds to the hasty and tacked-on look of the form in general, and again may increase insecurity about giving. It is worth noting that the commercial sector - amazon.com, for example - keeps to the standard site format throughout the donation process.
- "This form's too complicated"
At some point, people are going to have got to stop clicking and start typing. At the moment, there is no alternative to the manually-filled out donations form, although with developments such as Microsoft Passport we may increasingly see such forms being automatically pre-filled by browsers with details such as your address and credit card details. Meanwhile, the only thing to do is to minimize the amount of information that people are expected to fill in, by reducing the amount of fields to a minimum and providing dropdown menus wherever possible.
The American Red Cross is good at this; NetAid isn't particularly. The Red Cross donation form looks shorter because it's better arranged on the page, while the NetAid form (https://donate.netaid.org/index.html) is perhaps three times as long as the browser window. NetAid has a confusing distinction between 'required' fields and non-required fields; the Red Cross lets people fill everything in - if people have left anything off, they are reminded of this when they submit the form.
Perhaps worst of all, halfway through the NetAid form is a place to fill in your interests - a chance to choose between 'ending hunger', 'helping refugees', 'saving environment', 'securing human rights', 'relieving debt', or 'other'. These are all so self-evidently good and mutually inclusive things (at least to people who have got as far as filling their details on a NetAid donation form) that it's hard to see what use the data could be put to - and it's a further thing to flummox potential donors.
- "How much should I give?"
One tactic frequently employed in direct mail fundraising is to provide specific suggestions for amounts donors may wish to give - Howard Lake writes that this is 'the most commonly-used and successful method of increasing the average donation' (23).
The NSPCC make good use of this, and suggest three amounts to give: either £10, £50, or £1000, with concrete examples of what these donations would pay for (24). NetAid makes no such distinction, and gives no real incentive to people to donate larger amounts.
- "I don't trust these people to spend my money wisely"
Although I have left this consideration until towards the end, it is perhaps the most important. The September 1999 CMS survey of 'socially engaged' Internet users found that 38% considered information about how a charity spends the contributions it receives to be 'one of the most important' things to have on a Web site. Over half considered that, in exchange for their loyalty, it was "absolutely essential" for a charity to be accountable, and 42% thought that it was "absolutely essential" for a charity to show real progress. Misson statements were considered critical by 31%; information about the amount spent on overhead considered critical by 27%; and examples of accomplishments by 25%.
Here, NetAid falls down badly. In answer to the question on the 'Give' form of 'Where does the money go?', the site simply states,
'Monies donated to NetAid will be managed and distributed by the NetAid Foundation. The NetAid Foundation will select and fund projects directly related to poverty eradication. The Foundation will publish a list of all funded projects. These projects will be followed and the results reported.
No mention of overheads, no mention of even who the Foundation are. (In fact, this was not announced until a press release issued weeks after the concert) (25). No mention of specific projects, or of how these will be monitored. No definite pledges about how the money would be spent. These things would (or very hopefully should) have been known before the concerts, even if specific amounts of money could not have been allocated. To offer such a dismissive general gloss seems to be an insult to donors' intelligence.
- "In fact, who are these people anyway?'
Finally, a simple question that seems to have been overlooked by the site designers. The CMS Survey found that 38% of people surveyed considered that basic information such as a charity's address and phone number to be one of the most important things to include. Yet nowhere do NetAid's organizers say who they are, or who to contact. There's details about the Press Room, about KPMG, Cisco et al, but we are not told who is in overall control, and who we should find accountable for the money we would like to give.
From all of this I hope it is fairly clear how the designers of the NetAid site largely failed to convert their visitors into donors. They needed to have created an atmosphere of community, humanity, excitement and dynamism so people 'connected' with the cause, and they needed to have taken much more account of people's psychological barriers to donating money online. To conclude, I would like briefly to turn to the reasons why this happened, and to ask what lessons could be learned from this failure by other non-governmental organizations.
3. Why did the NetAid site fail?
'A fundraising transaction is fundamentally different to a commercial business transaction and while fundraisers have much to learn from commercial practice they will commit a fatal, suicidal, error if they embrace commercial practices too enthusiastically... To succeed in fundraising marketing [a fundraiser] has to adapt commercial marketing methods, not simply adopt them'
Ken Burnett, 'Relationship Fundraising', 1992 (26)
"We're helping Cisco Systems and the United Nations Development Programme by applying Internet integration and e-commerce solutions to this first-of-its-kind global fight against extreme poverty in the world"
Rod McGeary, vice chairman, KPMG consulting services (27)
To build the NetAid site, according to KPMG's press release, the company used 'experience gained in transforming numerous industries through technological innovations - from the newspaper and advertising industry, to the electric utility industry and the fashion industry', and 'deployed a team of 50 e-Engineers - with combined electronic commerce experience of over 300 person years - for the development of the NetAid mega Web site and e-commerce solutions' (28).
Cisco Systems, on their Web site, state their view that NetAid exemplifies 'the Internet Ecosystem [which] is the business model of the Internet Economy', and states that within the Internet Economy, 'activity in the Internet Economy is self-organizing... the process of natural selection takes place around profit to companies and value to customers.' (29)
NetAid owes a huge debt to the support of KPMG and Cisco Systems - without the two companies' sponsorship, it is unlikely the concerts or the site could have taken place at all. Yet it is not unbelievably cynical to suggest that the companies were probably not acting totally altruistically. They each needed to prove something to the world, to an audience much wider than that they would normally reach. From their statements, it is clear that KPMG wanted to show it could build a solid business site, and that Cisco wanted to show it had unparalleled technical capabilities. Both wanted to publicly demonstrate their social concerns. (If the companies were being totally altruistic, why did they publicize their involvement so heavily?).
The NetAid site is the perfect synthesis of the desires of the two companies. If it were a business or e-commerce site, it would be wonderful. But it isn't, and it's not. Where was the input from charity fundraisers? What were the lessons learned from successful charity sites? What was the extent of the UN Development Program's contribution? I would suggest tentatively that to have made the content looser and introduce elements such as chatrooms, some element of control would have had to have been surrendered by KPMG and Cisco, and the risk factor would therefore have been higher. The content could have been 'deeper' - but what would the sponsors have gained?
Such tension between the desires of sponsors and the requirements of successful charity sites may yet be in its early days. Marci Lockwood, Executive Director of the Institute for Global Communications, a San Francisco nonprofit organization that helps charities make use of the web, for example believes that eventually 'non-profits will have to partner with for-profit firms as well as other non-profits to maintain visibility and to recruit and communicate with supporters on the Internet' (30).
As this happens, non-profit organizations will have to guard against their sites being warped into shopfronts for the profit organizations, as NetAid seems to have been. Once the identity of the charity is skewed, people are less likely to identify with and trust them, and thus are less likely to support them.
The section of the NetAid site entitled 'Is This for Real?' begins with the proposition, 'You're probably thinking - is NetAid just going to be another feel-good event we'll all forget about tomorrow?'. One of the answers provided is that '[t]his depends whether you believe that the NetAid Foundation has the commitment to follow through'. At the moment, from the evidence provided by the site, I'm living in hope - but not belief.
Bibliography
Bailey, Sean (1998) 'Fundraising guide is good start for Internet beginners', Philanthropy News Network Online, 26 November 1999.
CMS Interactive (1999) 'Socially Engaged Internet Users: Prospects for Online Philanthrophy and Activism', a study connected by the Mellman Group. (Http://www.craveronline.com).
Farhi, Paul (1999) 'NetAid Catches Few On the Web', Washington Post 17 November 1999, Page C01.
Funders Online (1999) 'Guidelines on Web Development' (http://
Hill, Nicola (1999) 'Charity begins online', The Guardian, 25 October 1999.
Lake, Howard (1996) Direct Connection's Guide to Fundraising on the Internet. Aurelian.
- 'Grasping the NETtle', Voluntary Voice July/August 1999
McCann, Paul (1999) 'Sponsors bail out NetAid rock flop', The Sunday Times, 2 December 1999.
Miller, Eric (1999) 'Surfer to Supporter: Fundraising on your web-site', Philanthropy News Network Online, 26 October 1999.
Seacombe, Mark (1999) One billion click around the clock, The Observer, 10 October 1999.
Stewart, Sandra (1999) 'I gave at the office computer', ??, 29 November 1999.
American Red Cross http://www.redcross.org
Cisco systems http://www.cisco.com
Fundraising UK website http://www.fundraising.co.uk
The Hunger Site http://www.thehungersite.org
KPMG http://www.kpmg.com
NetAid http://www.netaid.org
NSPCC http://www.nspcc.org
Philanthropy News Network http://www.pnnonline.org
FOOTNOTES
1. Sunday Times 2 December 1999
2. The East African, 29 November 1999
3. The Washington Post, 17 November 1999
4. Nicola Hill, The Guardian, 25 October 1999
5. Figures from UN Hunger Site, January 2000
6. The Observer, 10 October 1999
7. 'NetAid Generates Over 40 Million Web Hits During Initial Launch'
8. From Michael Johnston, The Fundraiser's Guide to the Internet
9. From Sandra Stewart
10. From Sandra Stewart
11. From Cisco Systems press release
12. From 'Funders Online'
13. Howard Lake, 1999
14. Quoted in Sandra Stewart
15. Howard Lake, p65
16. Funders Online, building a successful charity site
17. Quoted in Sandra Stewart
18. Eric Miller
19. Although by mid-January this problem had been partially redressed by inserting above the pictures the phrase 'The Power to End Extreme Poverty is Now On-line'.
20. Howard Lake, 1996, p49
21. https://www.british-airways.com/flightSelling/startJrn.jhtml
22. CMS Interactive
23. Howard Lake, 1996, p49
25. 'NetAid Announces Its Foundation Board'
26. Quoted in Howard Lake, p2
27. KPMG press release, 8 September 1999
28. KPMG press release, 8 September 1999
30. Original interview and interpretation by Sandra Stewart
FURTHER NOTES, APRIL 2000
This piece was written as part of an MA degree course in Interactive Multimedia in January 2000.
By April 2000 the NetAid site had seen definite improvements, so if you look at the site now some of my criticisms in this piece look a little harsh. (Mind you, the donations process is still as pristinely bad as ever).
This whole thing though did get me interested in the whole issue of web design for donations though, with the result that I spent a while working on an online guide. Check out www.hitdonate.net for more details
Graham Francis, MA Interactive Multimedia 1999/2000, London College of Printing, January 2000. Contact gkfrancis@hotmail.com with any comments.
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