Silent Auction Tips

Pros and Cons of Using a Microsite for Your Next Auction

Is your nonprofit thinking about using a microsite to promote its next auction? Consider this list of pros and cons first before building your microsite.
Is your nonprofit thinking about using a microsite to promote its next auction? Consider this list of pros and cons first before building your microsite.

Auctions are among the most engaging and productive nonprofit fundraising events, but they require a good amount of investment from your organization. To plan a successful auction, you must procure the items, find a venue (if in-person), decide how attendees will bid on items, and acquire necessary digital event management tools (especially if you’re hosting a virtual event!)

What’s the best way to increase the ROI of a nonprofit fundraising auction? With top-quality digital marketing! A strong marketing campaign helps get the word out and grow your attendee list.

A common marketing method in the nonprofit space is the use of microsites to promote nonprofit events. Microsites can offer a unique angle to your event promotions, providing an additional platform for supporters to engage. But these sites take some work to get up and running, and you must develop them strategically to ensure they’re meeting your goals.

To help decide if a microsite is the right marketing tool for your auction, we created this guide to explore what you need to know about these sites. We’ll cover:

Understanding the pros and cons of an auction microsite is the first step in figuring out if this strategy is best for your needs. Let’s begin by going over the basics of what a microsite is and then dive into benefits and challenges.

What is a Microsite?

Kanopi defines a microsite as a website or page that is separate from an organization’s regular site structure but still branded to and associated with the main website.

A microsite is not a landing page on your website. Instead, it acts as a distinct entity. Here are the primary differences between your microsite and main website:

  • Each has a different domain/subdomain name
  • Microsites are sometimes temporary whereas your main site is permanent
  • A microsite hosts different content from the main site
  • A microsite has its own unique marketing strategy

So, how do these characteristics make microsites a helpful tool to market your next fundraising auction? Let’s explore how a microsite fits into an event marketing strategy.

Main Uses For a Microsite

There are a variety of reasons nonprofit and for-profit organizations use microsites to optimize their marketing approach. In particular, microsites do the following:

  • Allow organizations to experiment with different media formats, including blogs, videos, quizzes, polls, and audio
  • Create an additional online platform for your organization to engage with new and current supporters
  • Bring attention to a new offering, event, or program
  • Act as an additional channel to grow email lists or gain social media followers
  • Show a different side to your nonprofit with new content that focuses on different topics than your main website.

A microsite is a valuable marketing tool and can be a critical component of any nonprofit’s digital strategy. Because it’s an isolated site that acts as another platform for supporter engagement, a fundraising event microsite can increase registrations and bring in additional revenue.

Pros and Cons of Using a Microsite for Your Auction

Now that you understand what a microsite is and its basic uses for a nonprofit organization, it’s time to determine if it’s worth creating one for your next fundraising auction.

You might think that having a dedicated auction event page on your website is enough. A landing page hosts the necessary event information, facilitates event registration, and offers easy access to other website content for supporters to learn more about your mission. What exactly can a microsite do for your nonprofit that a normal web page on your main site can’t?

Auction Microsite Pros

Here are some of the standout benefits of using a microsite for your fundraising auction:

  1. New lead generation. Microsites offer a unique opportunity to target key audiences. New supporters and attendees can learn about both your auction and your entire organization through the microsite. You’ll achieve the best results when you use a targeted marketing strategy to drive traffic from a variety of sources, such as your social media pages or search engine results pages. Getting Attention recommends using Google Ads to drive search traffic to your microsite. These ads are strategically placed at the top of Google search results pages, ensuring that your microsite will stand out to people searching for related terms.
  2. Help with data analytics. Microsites are usually dedicated to a specific project, like advertising an upcoming nonprofit auction. Because of this, microsites are great for data analysis. You can easily determine the types of audiences who are interested in your auction, track key performance indicators such as site visits and event registrations, and gain a better sense of the number of leads you’re getting. With this specific data, you can learn more about your supporters and create even more targeted outreach content.
  3. Act as the dedicated resource for the event. Hosting a microsite for your auction event is a valuable place to hold all auction event details. If this is an annual auction, supporters probably remember it by name more than anything else. Having a dedicated microsite with the auction name as the domain reassures supporters and attendees that this is a reliable source for any information they might need. From finding the auction rules to signing up and even browsing items, supporters can get everything done in one central location. If you’re considering a virtual auction, you can even host the online bidding and item checkout process right on your microsite.

As you can see, microsites offer plenty of advantages for your marketing strategy, but they do require some work to build and maintain. If you’re not using it for the right reasons or you don’t properly leverage its benefits, a microsite can backfire and even lower your marketing potential. Let’s dive deeper into this topic by reviewing the cons.

Auction Microsite Cons

There are several microsite development considerations and content choices that can negatively affect your event’s marketing ROI.

Here are some of the considerations you should keep in mind when contemplating an auction microsite:

  1. Microsites take time to build out and maintain. You’ll need to create a separate site and devote time and resources to maintain it. This isn’t just building out a simple webpage—you need to consider site elements like user experience, navigation, layout, design, content, security, and more. If you don’t currently have the time and resources to devote to this project, you might want to reconsider if a microsite is worth it.
  2. A microsite might spread information too thin. A common challenge for microsites is not repeating the same information from your main nonprofit website. Along the same lines, if you don’t have enough content for both your main website and auction microsite, it risks spreading information too thinly. As a result, visitors to either website won’t receive the value they need. This can negatively impact your search engine optimization and cause your sites to be marked as non-authoritative.
  3. The site could confuse supporters. If you fail to associate your microsite with your nonprofit’s larger brand, you risk confusing supporters. This is especially true with new supporters. Even if they find out about the auction through the microsite, they might not even realize that it's associated with your nonprofit. This negatively impacts brand recognition.  

It isn’t worth building a microsite without strong reasoning behind it. In fact, creating purposeless microsites can be a drain on resources, as your team will have to put in extra work to maintain a site that doesn’t serve your overall marketing goals.

However, if you have a clear strategy for your microsite and room in your team’s schedule to build it, it may be the right marketing tool to take your outreach to the next level. If this is the case for your team, read on for key strategies to build a well-designed microsite.

What a High-Quality Microsite Looks Like

Once you've considered the pros and cons and decided that you're ready to build a microsite, you'll need to familiarize yourself with best practices.

Developing a quality microsite involves the same best practices as creating a top nonprofit website. We’ve compiled a list of essential considerations to ensure that your microsite is the best it can be. All microsites should:

  • Be adaptable to changing circumstances. Keep your website strategy flexible by keeping an eye on your analytics and responding to changes in traffic or engagement. You should also ensure that the site is adaptable so you can update it for auction events in future years.
  • Have unique content. The content should be specific, direct, and relevant to the main focus of the microsite. Compare your microsite to your main website to identify any duplicate content and reformat it to avoid repetition.
  • Have intuitive navigation. The easier it is to use your microsite, the better the user experience, and the more likely visitors will continue engaging. Ensure your microsite has clear navigation elements, such as a simple menu.
  • Be accessible. Accessibility means ensuring that your microsite is usable for all audiences. Include alternative text for images, ensure sufficient color contrast, and follow other accessibility best practices laid out in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
  • Be easily shareableon social media, mobile apps, email, and more. This will help expand your target audience and promote your event widely, boosting registrations.
  • Have a clear call-to-action that serves the site’s central purpose. For instance, you might use the site to direct traffic to your auction registration form so visitors can quickly and easily register for the event.
  • Have analytic capabilities. You should be able to integrate your microsite with your nonprofit CRM and performance analysis tool to track data, such as registration numbers or fundraising totals.
  • Have an optimized URL name. The URL should reflect the purpose of the microsite. For example, you might want to use the event name as the URL so it’s easily recognizable for supporters.

A well-designed auction microsite doesn’t just encourage supporters to sign up for your event. It can also provide the foundation for ongoing supporter retention. When supporters have a positive experience signing up for and attending your auction, they’ll be more inclined to participate in your next fundraising event.

Wrapping Up

Just because you might see an opportunity to build a microsite doesn’t necessarily mean it’s always worth it for your nonprofit to create one. Remember, only the right circumstances and a high-quality microsite design will bring any of the benefits you want.

To ensure your microsite is as effective as possible, consider working with a nonprofit web design consultant. These professionals can help you design a microsite that meets your exact specifications and follows all nonprofit web design best practices.

Whether you work with your nonprofit’s internal marketing department or a web design agency, make sure your microsite is intentional, engaging, and optimized for reaching a wider audience of potential auction attendees.


About the Author: Anne Stefanyk

As Founder and CEO of Kanopi Studios, Anne helps create clarity around project needs, and turns client conversations into actionable outcomes. She enjoys helping clients identify their problems, and then empowering the Kanopi team to execute great solutions.

Anne is an advocate for open source and co-organizes the Bay Area Drupal Camp. When she’s not contributing to the community or running her thoughtful web agency, she enjoys yoga, meditation, treehouses, dharma, cycling, paddle boarding, kayaking, and hanging with her nephew.

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