By Ryan Fuquea

It’s hard to overstate the importance of having a quality website for nonprofit organizations. All of an organization’s outreach, marketing, and ads need to drive an audience to take action like donating, finding out about services, or signing up for information.

An effective website allows these actions to happen quickly and seamlessly, making the path to conversion for any of these actions feel effortless.

On the other hand, subpar websites actually distract audiences from the goals you want them to accomplish, confusing visitors with navigation that obscures the most relevant information or overloading them with too many calls-to-action.

As digital marketing experts, we have a basic process we use as a guide when we start new nonprofit website projects, ensuring that the end product is clear, easy-to-use, and ultimately, effective.

Let’s dive in.

The 6 Phases of a Successful Nonprofit Website Project

1. Discovery

During the discovery phase, your project team will define its goals and understand existing strengths, opportunities for growth, and audiences.

Identify Your Goals

The first step in building a better website is recognizing that you need one, and determining goals for redesign efforts. Sometimes you can look at data to determine if your current site is meeting your expectations.

Understand Audiences

Tools such as Google Analytics can help you determine which actions or content are getting more or less traction with audiences to optimize accordingly. Implementing audience surveys can also provide insight into what parts of your website may be resonating better or worse with your key groups.

Evaluate Content

Sometimes the issue may have to do with the visual presentation of your brand elements –– your site may just need a general facelift or improved accessibility. Marketing agencies can help audit and review your current site in more detail to provide you with specific recommendations to guide and prioritize your goals for your new website.

Site Audit

In a full site redesign, research may be required as a first step to inform strategy and design. This might involve doing an in-depth audit of all of the existing content for your current site, as well as research and documentation about any other technical platforms (like CRM systems or fundraising platforms at your organization). This also might entail doing deeper research into your audience groups and mapping their specific needs at various stages of their journey interacting with your organization.

SEO Audit

An SEO audit is an important step to capture insights for your site rebuild, ensuring audiences can easily find it via search. An SEO audit involves taking an in-depth analysis of all the factors that affect a website’s visibility in search engines. Doing this audit gives complete insights into the website, overall traffic, and individual pages in regards to site health and overall domain authority.

Here are just a few things to consider during an SEO audit:

• Does your site support a breadcrumb structure?
• Does your navigation make …read more

  Source:: HubSpot Blog

        

  

  Author: Aaron