When approaching a website redesign for your nonprofit organization or business, addressing these 5 key questions will help you assess your current website and create clear goals to create a new website that makes a measurable impact for your organization.
- What are your primary goals for the website?
What are you trying to accomplish with the website? Are you increasing awareness about your organization and its mission? Collecting donations? Increasing your volunteer base? Gathering support? Create a list of your primary communication goals in order to drill down and create a website that will meet these goals. - Who is your target demographic?
Who will you be communicating to with your website? What do they care about? Why are they visiting your website (to gather information, to volunteer? donate?) Do they already know about your organization’s mission and work? It is likely that your organization will have multiple audiences – note as many as you can and then think about them in tandem with your primary goals for the website to identify 1-3 primary target audiences. - What would you like a visitor to know about your organization within 5 seconds of visiting your website? What is the key information you want your website visitors to glean when they visit your website?
- What are the primary calls to action for each of your primary target audiences? What do you want your website visitors to do when they visit your website? Sign up to volunteer? Donate? Learn about your organization’s mission and activities? Create a list.
- What is working well on your current site? What is not working? Identify specific content or calls to action that are working well for your organization. Review your website analytics to see how people are using your website, which pages are getting the most visits and which are not. How long are they staying on the website? What page do they most frequently exit from?
- Are there any new functionalities that you want built into the new site? Some ideas include: event registration, payment processing for donations, a blog, board member bios, user accounts. Take a look at other organizations’ websites to get an idea of what is possible and what you would like to implement. With open-source content management systems like WordPress, many advanced functionalities can be provided by a free or low-cost plugin to engage your website visitors.
