A good nonprofit website tells a great story about your organization’s work — it educates potential donors and volunteers about why your work matters, builds trust, and connects people with your services. Your website should also make it easy for visitors to accomplish what they came to your site to do.
Does your website do both? If not, it might be time to rethink, redesign, or refresh. Thinking about how well your website is accomplishing your organization’s and your users’ goals BEFORE you embark on a redesign can save you time and money. You might even be able to vastly improve the user experience with just a few content updates.
Here are some things to think about before you hire a web designer.
Does your website tell the story of your organization?
Before you do anything else, get clear on what you want your website to accomplish. At the very least, your website should tell the story of your nonprofit. What need is your organization filling? How does it accomplish that need? Why does your work matter? Who is benefitting and how? What is the impact you are making? A visitor should be able to immediately get the answers to all of those questions just by visiting your home page. What else do you want people to know? Make sure that information is front and center, or easily accessible.
Imagery is important. Show the impact you are making, don’t just tell. Infographics can help those impressive statistics stand out better than a bulleted list. Pictures of your staff and board give your organization a human face. If you serve a specific population, make sure the people you serve see themselves in the imagery you use so they know your organization is for them. Snapshots from events give volunteers and prospective patrons a glimpse of how much they could be enjoying themselves and connecting with other, likeminded people.
How is the user experience for your website visitors?
It’s important to get your message across, but site visitors have their own reasons for visiting your website. Take the time to think about your target audiences and what they are looking for. What are the three most important actions you want visitors to be able to accomplish when they visit your site? Is it easy for donors to give money through their payment method of choice? For volunteers to find out how they can help and then sign up? How about the people who benefit from your services? Can they easily find the information they need to take advantage of the services you provide? It should be easy for your users to accomplish what they came to your site to do.
Put your user hat on
One way to figure out if your user experience is working is to put your user hat on and actually try to donate $50 with a credit card, or sign up to volunteer. You will quickly learn where the friction is, and what information is missing.
A large insurance firm engaged my services to solve the problem of why they weren’t getting any job applications through their website. Starting the process as if I was trying to apply for a job on their site, I quickly figured out that the typical pathway to apply for a job led users in an endless circle. It was an easy problem to solve; nobody in the HR department had actually tried to apply for a job through the website. It is often an enlightening experience to look at your site from a user perspective.
Is your content working for you?
Once you are clear on what you want your website to accomplish from your organization’s perspective and your users’ perspective, it’s time to look at your existing content with these three questions in mind:
- What is helping with your goals? Maybe a link to the “Volunteer” page is right up front and people who want to volunteer with you can easily find out what their options are and what to do next. Congratulations.
- What is hurting you? Is there inaccurate or outdated content with broken links? At best, this makes you look careless, at worst, it erodes trust.
- What is missing? Do visitors have to hunt for the “Donate” button? We’ve all heard about fleeting attention spans — don’t make users work to accomplish this important goal.
Start by looking at what you have
A content audit with a free tool like Screaming Frog will give you a comprehensive list of all the pages on your site. That list can help you identify any stale content that can be immediately eliminated, like old event pages and landing pages for programs that no longer exist. Review each page and flag any information that needs to be updated or removed, like staff changes or outdated COVID information. This will give you a fresh start if you are moving content to a new website platform or design. Even if you aren’t planning to redesign your whole site, an annual content audit that ensures all of the content on your site is up to date makes you look buttoned up and organized.
Decide what to keep and what to kill
Looking at that list of pages might bring up strong emotions for some people in your organization, especially if they lobbied to create certain content in the first place. Objectively evaluating content based on whether or not it meets user and organizational goals will make the decision to keep or get rid of content easier. Metrics can help as well. Look at what people are clicking on (and what they aren’t clicking on). These metrics can tell an interesting story about what is important to your users.
Maybe you are an animal sanctuary who is considering getting rid of your “Pet of the Week” feature because it’s a lot of work, until you see that the Pet page gets more clicks than any other page on the site. Better yet, you find out that the “Adopt me” link on the Pet of the Week page gets ten times as many clicks as the same links on the pets who are not featured. If one of your organization’s goals is to get animals adopted as quickly as possible, it’s an easy decision to keep that page, and to consider getting more leverage out of it by promoting it on social media and in your newsletter.
Decide what needs to be added
Once you know what you have, it’s time to look for opportunities to add content. How could you better support those user goals and organizational goals? I worked with a client recently who hadn’t realized that there was nothing about what they do or why on the home page. Their mission, vision and values were buried deep in the Who We Are section under photos of their board and staff. You had to really hunt to find out what this organization was all about. Many staff members had been with the organization for decades — they assumed everyone already knew what their organization does. This is where an outside consultant can help light up blind spots. It can be hard to think from a user perspective when you are so familiar with your work.
Talk to the people who listen
Ask the person who answers your phone and email what they think. They know what information people are looking for, and what is hard to find on your website. One of my first jobs was to answer emails that came through the website of a technology company. By listening to what people were asking for, I recommended and implemented changes on the website that reduced email queries from an average of 300 to 160 messages per week. Listen to your users.
How to put all of this into action
Start by getting clear on the story you want to tell and decide if your website is doing a good job telling that story. Then think from your users’ perspective and evaluate how easy it is for them to accomplish their goals. Keep both sets of goals in mind as you decide what to keep, what to get rid of, and what to add. If you need objective help deciding what to keep, kill, or add, give me a call. My website assessments are ruthless, but kind.
