Online maturity
In 2013 we launched a renewed English-language website, www.warchildholland.org, which targets our international constituency and includes an English-language webpage for every War Child country programme. During the year we also added an online donation tool and provided information and country pages in Spanish for local use in Colombia.
Furthermore, we integrated our websites targeting children, www.kidsforwarchild.nl and www.warchildschoolmusical.nl, into our main Dutch-language website, www.warchild.nl, bringing all of our online activities targeting the Dutch audience together in one online platform. We also invested in optimising www.warchild.nl to have better performance and more option for online fundraising.
In 2014 we will launch an international website, www.warchild.org, profiling War Child International, and integrate our I DEAL methodologies website, www.warchildlearning.org, into www.warchildholland.org. The integration is expected to increase the traffic for both websites, starting in the 2014-2015 period.
Set in 2010, War Child’s overall goal to double traffic, use and conversions on warchild.nl within five years, is still on track. Although we did not reach our 2013 target for unique visitors, we did increase in overall visitors and traffic by 30 percent. The reason for the lower number of unique visitors in 2013 is largely due to less mass media visibility during the second half of 2013; War Child’s campaign at the end of 2012 and the publication of our first report on Syria resulted in significant media attention, and increased the number of unique visitors to the website.
In 2013, www.warchild.nl’s conversion rate was 0.7 percent for single donations, 0.14 percent for Friends (structural donations) and 0.82 percent for fundraising activities by third parties. This means that 283,510 unique visitors on warchild.nl resulted in:
Social media
Further developments in social media and web care met their targets as planned. Our initial target for Facebook page likes in 2013 was 8,000, however, an average of almost 300 new page likes each month in 2013 lead to a total of 10,948 likes on our Facebook page. Our Facebook community is active: on average we have 2,847 interactions (likes, shares, comments) per month, which averages to 91,306 people reading or contributing each month, three times that of 2012. In total we reached 1,095,678 people via our Facebook activities. Our Twitter goal was to reach 12,000 followers. Over the course of 2013, we gained 182 new Twitter followers per month resulting in 12,252 unique followers at the end of the year. A web care team of five people monitored Twitter around the clock, seven days a week, and was able to respond to all messages about War Child.
| Websites | Unique visitors | Page views | Planned vs. realised (UV) | Target group |
| www.warchild.nl | 263,252 | 1,052,036 | -12% | Constituency, those interested in War Child |
| www.warchild.nl/kids (replacing www.kidsforwarchild.nl & www.warchildschoolmusical.nl) | 38,062 | 144,673 | -37% | Children 7-12 years old, teachers |
| www.warchildholland.org | 30,666 | 119,198 | -87% | International constituency, those interested in War Child |
| www.warchild.org | 101,216 | 237,912 | -20% | International constituency, those interested in War Child |
| www.warchildlearning.org | 2,572 | 20,332 | 3% | DEALS method facilitators, social workers |
| www.annualreportwarchild.org | 3,761 | 15,724 | -6% | Constituency, official institutions, development cooperation sector, journalists, donors, partner organisations, embassies, those interested in War Child |
| www.538voorwarchild.nl | 148,268 | 571,502 | 17% | Constituency of Radio 538 |
Lessons learnt
Now that War Child has created its Dutch online platform by integrating our Dutch-language sites into www.warchild.nl, focus can turn to optimising our English-language website, www.warchildholland.org. Although the site was upgraded in 2013, we haven’t yet focused on optimising the website and increasing the conversion rate towards the benchmark average of 1.6 percent, which will be a priority in 2014. At the same time, we will focus more on maintaining a constant stream of online content for different target groups, thereby shifting the focus from tools to online streams.
In this regard, targets for the number of followers and likes on social media are less relevant, while engaging with our online community becomes more important. To this end, we will formulate new key performance indicators and targets for social media in 2014. Growth will be realised by engaging our existing friendship network online and through organic growth. A good issue management policy and a monitoring tool and toolkit are key to effective web care; these will receive attention in 2014.
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