As Charlie Brown used to say “AAAARRRRGGGHHHH!!!”

I recently looked up a former client’s website to “tweet” them for Twitter’s #charitytuesday. On the home page I looked for the “Donate” button … and looked and looked. Finally, buried on another page I found this (copied directly):
If you would like to donate via the internet please go to http://www.JustGive.org or http://www.guidestar.org . Once on one of those sites you can just search for [name of org omitted to protect the guilty]. You will then be lead to our donation page.

I wish I was making this up.

Look at any non-profit website, and what you see is a krappy kludge of boring bad print, boring bad video, and boring bad audio–and most of it is not only out of date, but rarely leverages or supports earned media where the real excitement is.

Who was the www guru who thought that a website should be an impenetrable, unreadable, emotionally-bereft info-wall of textual and graphic noise?

How many nonprofit websites invoke a clear emotional response the moment they load? While I haven’t visited them all, but based on the many I have, the answer approaches “none”. Perhaps that’s an exaggeration. Less than “none” would be more accurate, because what websites generally invoke is numbing, fearful confusion.

For an example of a website that does work, in my view, visit http://www.starbucks.com where video with (wait for it) stories are featured on the wide screen in HD. Or visit http://www.savingdinah.com.

Here’s the take home message. Human beings are feeling animals that think. They are not–repeat not–thinking animals that feel. If a non-profit’s website is information heavy, rather than one that instantly invokes a profound emotional experience, by definition, it sucks. If it relies on text and still images, rather than video, it sucks. If it lacks a narrative that evokes emotion, it sucks. By all means have lots of information, but put it somewhere away from the main pages and visitors where it won’t drive a telephone pole sized stake through the non-profit’s emotional heart.

People do things for emotional reasons. They then acquire the information necessary to rationalize their emotional response. For all practical purposes, nobody thinks and nobody reads; they watch, they listen, and they feel!

Websites–as a medium–offer a phantasmagorical, and evermore fascinating palate of opportunities to evoke emotions, and, only incidentally, to provide the necessary factual rationales to turn those emotions into action. However, the web world’s creative people haven’t yet mastered the medium. The copy writers are writing copy that wouldn’t make it in a Dear Friend letter. The web designers are mastering Flash that barely expands on the art of the travel brochure. The social media people are living in a delusion. And those who are masters at evoking emotion, are nowhere to found. They’re writing novels and plays, making TV shows, and producing movies and musicals. They’re making people feel.

There, that feels better.