One of the most outward facing parts of your organization is your website. Whether you put $1 or $1 million into it, it's important to make sure that you're taking into account it's important in bringing value to your organization. Think, often times, it can be a major medium for your constituents to make donations and as we've discussed previously, 1 out of every 2 visitors will judge an organizations credibility on it's website. Who's going to want to donate on a platform that doesn't wow them, or that they don't deem credible? We know it can be expensive, so here's how you can Improve Your Website on a Tiny Budget.
- Set Goals: If getting donations is what you wish to accomplish with your website, write it down! Write down what it is your goals are for the site and then do a short audit of which of those goals your site might already be accomplishing
- Organize: This is key. The ease of navigation of your main menu will be a big facilitator in connecting your constituents to the information and pages they need to access in a quicker period of time. If they find it difficult to find a page, they're more likely to give up and go elsewhere for the information, or elsewhere with their donations. A rule of thumb is to keep the main menu broken out into no more than 5 sections
- Reduce: This is a great time to consolidate your resources, go through outdated case studies and make the copy on each page more concise. You're going to want to make each page as straight to the point as possible. Your visitors will get bored having to navigate through outdated or not so useful content.
- Refine: Going along with reducing, you may want to put effort into refining your site via the use of color, to better lead the eye through different pages, or even the phrasing of tabs on your main menu in order to make the wording less confusing.
- Recruit: If there are still changes that are necessary but your organization might not be capable of fixing them yourself, it might pay off to hire a freelancer depending on the amount of work that needs to be done. Oftentimes they will be familiar with the HTML of the site and will be able to make changes in a matter of hours.
For updates and changes that range outside of the scope of your organization or a freelancer, many independent design firms are willing and available to take on a redesign. Tech Impact can help with website development and many other technical aspects that may naturally fall outside of the range of the typical nonprofit.
