Planning For A Website That Gets Results

One participant in a recent Tech Tuesday session posed the question: “My organization has multiple audiences. How can our website satisfy them all?”

We nonprofits ask a lot from our websites. Tell our story. Attract funding. Promote our services or increasingly, deliver them. Inform and educate. Encourage a community of like-minded individuals. Help us meet our mission and goals. In fact, your website is a highly visible intersection of your organization’s needs and the needs of your constituencies. The success of your site depends on how well you satisfy these complementary or competing goals.

Whether you are launching your online presence for the first time, evaluating the effectiveness of an existing site, or ready for a redo, your answers to some key questions should drive your decision-making.

  • Who are your audiences?
  • What are their goals?
  • How and where do their goals intersect with your organization’s goals?
  • What online features can support those goals?
  • How you will measure your success?

We’ve outlined a process to help you identify and prioritize your goals and created a Website Goals Worksheet to help guide you through it.

Tips

  • This is a great group activity. It can help everyone involved in developing the website reach a common understanding of the purpose of the site.
  • Do this activity before interviewing vendors or developers. Their reaction to your findings will tell you a lot about how well they listen to your needs. Get their suggestions on how to organize the site to appeal to different audiences. See if they come up with additional options for potential features and economical ways to implement them.
  • Use the results to get buy-in from staff not participating in the activity, get backing from board members, and help make a clear case when fundraising for your site.

In articles over the next few weeks we will discuss what deliverables you should expect from a web developer, how to create an internal culture that is website-friendly, and how to measure your success.

Steps to Identify Your Website goals

  1. Start by choosing one of your organization’s goals for your website. Ideally, this goal is part of a larger strategic plan.
  2. Identify each user group or audience for the goal—there may be more than one. For instance, in the example on the worksheet, graduate and undergraduate students could have been listed as separate users with different goals.
  3. List the goals for each user group. Think about what you want them to do on your site and what you want them to do when they leave your site It’s OK if they overlap with the goals of other user groups.
  4. Brainstorm ways your users can accomplish their goals on your site. These are the potential features of your site.
  5. List ways you can measure or observe the effectiveness of each feature with each audience. Remember to include measures that support your larger strategic goals.
  6. Repeat until all organizational goals are listed. Keep in mind that there may be organizational goals that it doesn’t make sense to support online.
  7. Review your chart for user goals that may fall outside of your organization’s goals. These user goals could be just the things that drive people to your site and engage them in areas of more concern to you.
  8. Finally, prioritize your goals and your users. This will help you invest your efforts and resources where they can make the greatest impact

Get in touch

Do you have questions? Comments? We’d love to hear from you.
email: ccts@ubalt.edu
phone: (410) 837-6741