Ah, websites. They are often your organization’s first impression to a potential donor or volunteer and so they are a critical online resource. And, unlike in the early days of the internet, your website needs to be updated and refreshed every few years to keep up with the times. At every nonprofit that I have worked at, the thought of this process is a cause for groans and grimaces, because it’s a huge investment of time and money.
For me, the best way to manage a big on-going project like this is to get out in front of it and spend some time thinking and planning. To help organize the project, I think of it in terms of a three-legged stool. Before I talk more about the three legs, some words of wisdom…
“If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.” ― Yogi Berra
First Leg: Branding and Design
Redesigning your website is a great time to review your organization’s brand and make sure it’s all saying what you intend it to say. Given today’s segmented and social media filled world, a consistent brand is about more than just that little logo. Getting clarity on your palette, style, brand personality, and voice will help your web designer provide you with better options and your staff draft cohesive content. I’ll write another blog post on how to do a full Brand Audit, but these are the key elements to review before redesigning your website:
- Communications Review: Take a look at your materials and be honest about what’s working and what’s not
- External Review: What do similar nonprofits’ logos and websites look like? How do you stack up?
- Think about your voice: Interview staff, board, volunteers to get a sense of their impressions of the brand. You could ask some key staff to take the Brand Personality quiz online to find which matches your organization or gauge whether they are on the same page.
- Target Audience: Who is coming to your website and why? Who do you want to visit and why?
- Brand Identity: What is your brand’s color palette, font structure, tagline, visual style? What exactly do you want your brand to convey.
Where I work, for example, we describe ourselves as a 100 year old start-up, to convey both expertise and innovation.
Second Leg: Reframing the Content
You will save yourselves and your web designer lots of time, money, and headaches if you have a pretty clear idea what you are trying to accomplish. For now, just build a simple outline of how you think the site should be organized based on the target audience, both current and desired, to engage with your site.
Try to look at your website from the eyes of your target customer(s) and make the information they are looking for easy to access. Think about what action you want them to take on your website (sign up for e-news or to volunteer or donate) and how you can encourage them to do so. Highlight the resources and content people visit or search for most often on your site right up front. Include notes about potential links to additional content on pages, resource, or blogs that are popular, and to ensure that those pages have an action item as well.
Do NOT be beholden to the way things are currently organized or the way your organization talks about its program internally. For example, when I was working at a child abuse organization, we had a Public Education program, Parent Education Program, and CASA program and each of those had a menu dropdown on the website. The CASA program was the only one of those that was clearly understood by our volunteers and supporters. Meanwhile, parents were looking for tips on potty training in the parent education section, while we considered it public education. In the new site, we decided that all the materials and resources we wanted parents to have access to would reside in a highly visible and reorganized Parent Resource Center, clearly a more intuitive spot for parents to find what they were looking for!
Third Leg: Technical Mumbo-Jumbo
I kid about the mumbo-jumbo, of course, but not about the importance of figuring out how to get your website to function properly and for most nonprofits, this means without a web guru on site every day. Hopefully, you do have a web person that you can trust and rely on, so this part will be easy. Whether they do the design or not, they will have thoughts about what the technical aspects of the website will be like and can help you craft some questions to ask about the technical stuff when you are choosing a designer. If you have a WordPress or other site where you can manage some of the basic content yourself, jot down your pain points while working on it over the course of a few weeks. You can include solving these on the technical wish list for your new site.
