Visitors to your website immediately scan the page to see if there is any visually interesting content. Unfortunately, for many nonprofits, pages are often loaded with relatively boring written content (sorry to be so blunt!).

One of the ways to change this is through Icons - a proven and simple way to communicate the same message in a way that is much more visually compelling.

Icons have been demonstrated to guide a visitor’s eye to the most important areas of content and visually break up paragraphs, lists, and steps, making them less boring and easier to follow.

In some projects, icons make up for the imagery on a website that lacks photographs. One website that Fission recently launched that illustrates this is www.civicdatachallenge.org. You can see how we used icons on this site to create the featured image that explains the Civic Data Challenge process in a unique and easy-to-read way.

Now, really nailing an idea or phrase with an icon isn’t always easy, and designers do not always have time to create custom icons for their organizations or campaigns - especially when working with tight deadlines and low budgets.

So to help, we’ve created a free downloadable icon pack, specially themed for use in nonprofit web design. Designers can download this .psd freebie and use all of these icons for any project. We have also uploaded most of these icons to the Noun Project, a searchable online database of icons that are downloadable in .svg format.

If you’ve used any of our icons in your projects, please share the URL to this post. We would love to see them in action – you can also tweet your pages to us at @Fissionstrategy!