Bureau for Good Branding & web design for folks who do good

Nonprot Website Assessment Guide

Assess your sites effectiveness & identify common problem areas

bureauforgood.com

Bureau for Good

Branding & web design for folks who do good

Bureau for Good builds websites & visual brands that help nonprots educate, advocate, inspire & serve.
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or visit bureauforgood.com/projects

Introduction
Your site is often the rst (and sometimes only) point of contact between your organization and your audiences. Most, if not all, of your outreach, marketing, PR, and social media efforts will point directly to your site. A bad site will turn audiences away, and that translates to lower outreach and marketing ROI. How do you know if youre turning your audiences away? Although a low bounce rate is often cited as proof of audience engagement, what it really says about your site is much more specic. It may show that theres good alignment between your content and keywords, or that your site contains landing pages with clear and appealing offers. Your bounce rate has less to say about audiences who arrive at your site with or without a specic goal in mind, and click around for several seconds before they get frustrated and give up. Other analytics data, such as funnel analysis, can help pinpoint engagement issues. However, some common usability problems can actually obscure your data. Got ambiguous navigation labels, or bad navigation that sends your visitors clicking in circles? Your numbers may be reecting confusion, not engagement. Analytics tell you what, but not why. User interviews can provide invaluable information about your site. But gathering a large interview sample can be cumbersome for many organizations, specially given the multiplicity of audience types for the average nonprot site. The good news is you dont need to run large-scale usability testing to identify the most common problems that may be plaguing your organizations site. This guide will help you identify some those problems, and its a great place to start if youre looking for actionable ways to improve visitor experience and engagement.

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What makes a good site?

A good site is one that successfully addresses the needs of two parties: the organization and the audience. Out of those two, the audience is boss. You cant make audiences read content that isnt relevant to their interests, or click around to nd information if theyre not motivated to do so, or stay on your site if they dont want to. Many organizations have an unconscious inward perspective that creeps into their content, their calls-to-action, and even their navigation labels. In other words, they have an organization-centered mentality. To improve your site, you must adopt a user-centered mentality, and make sure your content has an outward perspective. A better site experience, begins with asking three basic questions: 1. Who are your audiences? List the groups youd like to communicate with and inuence through your online presence. Examples: prospective donors and volunteers, clients, the media, the general public. 2. What do audiences want when they visit your site? (audience needs) Think about what each of your audience groups wants when visiting your site. Include both rst-time and repeat visitors. What kind of content about your organization would be most useful to them? Examples: I want to understand what this organization is all about. I want to learn about the impact it has on the communities it serves. I want to gure out how I can help. 3. What would you like them to do? (organizational needs) What would you like your visitors to learn and do once theyre on your site? These are your core messages and desired responses. Examples: become aware of an issue, support us, donate, spread the word, sign up for our mailing list. When your desired responses are successfully met, we call this a conversion.

A bit about your audiences

Audiences are smart. But theyre also busy and easily distracted, with their attention often split between several tasks: email, TV, work, chores. When asking yourself what your visitors want, think about the context theyre in when accessing your site. Are they at work, in a professional environment, or at home, surrounded by family? Either way, respect your visitors time and busy lives, and aim to communicate efficiently.

I want to understand what this organization is all about, FAST (before I get distracted)

I want to learn about the impact it has on the communities it serves, STAT (before I turn to a different nonprot website)

I want to gure out how I can help, NOW (while I have some spare time)

Prioritizing desired responses

When feeling overwhelmed with too many choices, audiences tend to choose none they simply give up! Thats why its important to prioritize desired responses. Focus your entire site on a small handful of high-value responses, and narrow down to an even smaller set (only one, if possible) on conversion-oriented pages. By doing so, you can drastically increase conversions.

DONATE!

SIGN UP!

PARTICIPATE! SPREAD THE WORD! SHARE YOUR STORY! JOIN US!

DONATE YOUR TIME! SIGN OUR PETITION!

START A FUNDRAISING PAGE!

WRITE TO YOUR CONGRESSPERSON! GIVE US YOUR OPINION! VISIT US! ADVOCATE! VOLUNTEER!

SHARE OUR CONTENT! TELL A FRIEND!

Overwhelmed? So are they

Creating user-centered content

In keeping with their inward perspective, some organizations create content they, not their audiences, would want to see or read. No matter how much you love your content, visitors wont consume it if it doesnt address their needs and interests. Whats worse, unnecessary content makes your useful content harder to nd, and will cause your audiences to give up and move on. Long-winded text, generic images, and boring videos are some examples of content that will cause your audiences to lose interest. Keep your content brief and to the point, avoid repetition, and always ask yourself: Can we say it in less words? Would anybody outside our organization care about this? This doesnt mean you need to restrict the amount of content on your siteas long as its relevant, write away! But it does mean you need to keep your content organized. If you havent already, make sure to keep your evergreen content (mission, impact, staff, locations) separate from your editorial or time-oriented content by using your blog or news section.

event photos

last nights gala how to help

long-winded descriptions

irrelevant videos

what we do

outdated stuff

policy updates

our EDs whereabouts

generic photos

our impact

Unorganized or irrelevant content makes everything harder to nd

Spotting navigation issues

When you go to the mall, you may start by heading straight to the oor plan to gure out where you are and where you want to go. You may also rely on signs posted throughout the building. Heres what you would NOT expect when visiting the mall: oor plans that contradict one another; nding a corner of the mall containing dozens of stores that arent on the oor plan; walking west and somehow ending up in the east wing. If you did, youd be confused and frustrated. Youd want to leave as soon as possible. On a website, navigation works in a similar way to a mall oor plan. Good navigation should help users understand where they are, what section theyre in, and what path they used to get there. A site with bad or inconsistent navigation will cause audiences to quickly become frustrated. Some symptoms of bad navigation include:
ff Branching

sections that go too many levels deep (on most nonprot sites, more than 4; news and information sites are an exception) excess of main navigation items(for most nonprot sites, more than 8-10; news and information sites are an exception) labels or calls-to-action that visitors would nd confusing or unclear

ff An

ff Navigation ff Lack

of waynding cues, such as clearly marked parent sections and breadcrumbs

ff Inconsistent

navigation, such as a mismatch between the main navigation dropdowns, the sidebar navigation, and the section landing pages pages that are listed in the navigation under several sections, giving the impression that they are either repeated, or that they dont belong to any one section pages or entire sections that appear nowhere on the navigation or list pages, and are accessible only through an inline link (form pages are a possible exception)

ff Content

ff Content

Optimizing forms
Conversion-oriented forms, such as those for donations or email subscription, represent a delicate balancing act. You want to gather as much actionable visitor information as you can: full name, address, phone number, work number, the works. But each additional eld can drastically reduce conversions. Your visitors cant be bothered to ll in long forms, or dont want to give away personal information without a good reason to do so. Optimize your forms by gathering only the most high-value information about your visitors, so you can keep form elds to a minimum. In addition, keep your conversion pages focused by providing a single call-to-actionthe purpose of your form. Additional calls-to-action distract your users and reduce conversions.

SUBMIT!
Too many questions can lead to too few answers

User-centered layout & design

Good layout is about visual hierarchysome elements are emphasized in relation to others. Good designers use size, color, and negative (empty) space, among other things, to create emphasis. The skillful use of these techniques serves to guide the visitors eye. The design process often fails because of a lack of clear goals: the elements to be emphasized have not been established or prioritized. An improvised approach results in messy layouts with no clear focus. As a result, audiences dont know where to look. The design process can succeed only when core messages and desired responses dictate design decisions. One notable characteristic of the online experience is scrolling. Most website layouts are taller than visitors browsers, and are designed to be viewed, not as a whole, but an area at a time. This means you can have several areas, stacked vertically, each with it own focus or purpose. This works particularly well on homepages. What remains essential is that each area be executed with a goal in mind. Compare these two nonprot homepages. Which one displays more clearly dened goals? Which one better communicates core messages and desired responses? Which one does your own site resemble more?

Seeking outside help

Once you complete your website assessment, youre ready to determine the extent of the work required to improve your sites experience. Perhaps all you need is to rethink your content creation strategy, and train your team to create more user-centered content. If the changes need to go much deeper, youll want to seek a web design rm to help you redesign the site from scratch. A good web design consultant or rm is a knowledgeable partner that can help you establish messaging and desired response priorities, think about your site in more user-centered ways, and bring up issues and problems you hadnt even thought about. Hope you found our guide useful!

Dont start your nonprot website without me

A checklist of functionality, features & third-party services for nonprot websites
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or visit bureauforgood.com/checklist