1. Presented by Barbara Pritchard
Coordinated by Alex Green
Website Strategy
Planning for Nonprofits
2. 501 Commons HandsOn Tech brown bag Website Strategy
About HandsOn Tech
HandsOn Tech is a national
AmeriCorps program funded in
partnership with:
• Google
• Points of Light Foundation
• The Corporation of National
Community service
About 501 Commons
One Stop Shop for Nonprofits
• Technology Services
• Financial Services
• Human Resources Services
• Management Consulting
Services
For more info:
501 Commons.org
3. Presented by Barbara Pritchard
Coordinated by Alex Green
Website Strategy
Planning for Nonprofits
4. 501 Commons HandsOn Tech brown bag Website Strategy
Did you know?
Online giving grew 10.7% in 2012 compared to 2011
• Large nonprofits up 7.2%
• Medium sized nonprofits up 14.3%
• Small nonprofits up 11.8%
Source: Blackbaud 2012 Charitable Giving Report
Source: Dunham+Company, Direct Mail Study
5. 501 Commons HandsOn Tech brown bag Website Strategy
But where to start?
Always remember….
You are not designing for yourself.
Strategies to help develop your digital plan:
• Stakeholder & User Interviews
• Personas
• Heuristic Analysis
• User Experience Design
6. 501 Commons HandsOn Tech brown bag Website Strategy
Information Architecture
IA is a….
“On the internet, information architecture means how a
website's content is organized and presented to
its users to facilitate navigation and search
functions.”
Source: BusinessDictionary.com
7. 501 Commons HandsOn Tech brown bag Website Strategy
Stakeholder Interviews
A stakeholder is anybody who is part of an organization and can affect or is
affected by its web content, branding and/or the information provided through the
organization’s digital offerings.
8. 501 Commons HandsOn Tech brown bag Website Strategy
Stakeholder Interviews
1. Identify primary the stakeholders.
Examples: Executive Director, Board Members, Fundraisers, Accounting, Content
Mangers, Marketing Managers, Volunteer Coordinators.
2. Prep your questions
Examples:
• From your perspective, what are some of the critical audiences for the website?
• What are the most important things people can do, or actions they can take on the
website?
• How can the website support our organizations mission?
• How do you personally use the website?
• What role do you think does the website play in the organization’s business
strategy?
• What kind of information, features or functionality needs to be there that isn’t now?
• What new initiatives do you have planned for the next 1-3 years?
• Who would you consider competitors of the organization?
3. Listen & Take notes
Your opinion matters, but should not during these interviews. Verbalize your
understanding (“If I understood you…”), Use neutral phrases to encourage the
interviewee (“I see”), Listen actively for meaning and emotion as well as for the facts.
9. 501 Commons HandsOn Tech brown bag Website Strategy
User Interviews & Usability testing
Get to know the End Users of your organizations
digital offerings – the people that visit your site. Who
are they, and what do they need from your website?
Examples: Beneficiaries, Donors, Volunteers.
10. 501 Commons HandsOn Tech brown bag Website Strategy
User Interviews & Usability testing
1. Surveys – Find out what’s most important to your users
Rule of thumb – Keep it simple, write questions at 7th grade reading level.
Examples using a 5 point scale:
• How often do you <topic>?…Never, Rarely, Occasionally, Frequently, Often
• How important is <topic>?...Not at all, A little, Somewhat, Very much, Extremely.
• How much do you agree or disagree with <statement>? Strongly
disagree, Disagree, Neutral, Agree, Strongly Agree.
Examples of open ended questions:
• What is the purpose of your visit to our website?
• Were you able to complete your task today?
• If you were not able to complete the task, please explain why.
2. User Testing
Define a specific task or tasks and ask the user to walk you through achieving the
task. Do not lead the test subject.
• Were they able to achieve the task?
• How long did it take them?
• Were there points of frustration?
• Did you uncover what the user was expecting to happen?
11. 501 Commons HandsOn Tech brown bag Website Strategy
Personas
User Experience definition of Personas:
“Personas are fictional characters created to
represent the different user types within a targeted
demographic, attitude and/or behavior set that
might use a site, brand or product in a similar way.”
Source: Wikipedia, Persona (User Experience)
12. 501 Commons HandsOn Tech brown bag Website Strategy
Persona Examples
Profile
Gender
Age
Occupation
Character
Description
Site Usage
Web Confidence & Context
Brand Association
Environmental Attitude
Source: Boagworld, “An experience with User Personas”
13. 501 Commons HandsOn Tech brown bag Website Strategy
Persona Examples
Age
Location
Salary
Online Activies
Offline Activities
Bio
Technical Comfort
Social Comfort (online)
Mobile Usage
Key entre trigger puts
Motivation to use
client, brand or project
Goals
Brands
Source: Dylaunx.com, “Corporate site redesign, A process Case Study”
14. 501 Commons HandsOn Tech brown bag Website Strategy
Persona Examples
Source: Advertising Communication Technology, “Target”
15. 501 Commons HandsOn Tech brown bag Website Strategy
Personas
As you map out your site keep asking questions….
Examples:
• Does feature X benefit a persona?
• What do I need to explain to support this persona?
• What sort of language should I use to make sure this persona understands
the message?
• What tone should be used to communicate to this persona?
• Will this persona be able to achieve their goal quickly and easily?
• Does my homepage speak to each persona? Can they get to where they
need to go easily?
16. 501 Commons HandsOn Tech brown bag Website Strategy
Heuristic Evaluation
“Heuristic evaluation (Nielsen and Molich, 1990; Nielsen 1994) is a
usability engineering method for finding the usability problems
in a user interface design so that they can be attended to as
part of an iterative design process.”
Source: Nielsen Norman Group, “How to conduct a Heuristic Evaluation”
Can be performed on…
• Your existing website.
• Competitor websites
• Wireframes &/or Prototypes
17. 501 Commons HandsOn Tech brown bag Website Strategy
Heuristic Evaluation
First, define use cases (ideally of personas)
Examples:
• Joe is researching volunteer opportunities and found our website via a
Google Search. He doesn’t know anything about us yet, and is trying
to determine if we’re a fit.
• Betty, a potential client, heard about our services and is seeking our
support. She’s heard good things, but hasn’t reached out for help
before.
• Jane is deciding on her holiday contributions. She’s donated to us
annually, and is familiar with our mission. She’s also been considering
setting up monthly automatic donations, but hasn’t done that before.
21. 501 Commons HandsOn Tech brown bag Website Strategy
Additional IA Terminology
User Experience Design includes:
• Content Analysis – What content do you have? What do you need?
Start with an inventory. This is usually done in Excel or some sort of
Matrix.
• Site Mapping – Defining pages, subpages, and overall hierarchy of
content.
• User Interaction flows – The movement of your user trough a task. For
example, what steps need to be taken to send a donation, sign up to
volunteer, login to the site….
• Wireframes – Defining the content to include per page and the overall
structure of the individual pages.
• Functional Specification – Annotating the wireframe to explain user
interaction (rollover states, where things should link to, how things
should function) as well as defining system requirements (what
browsers it must work on, what framework should it be build in, etc).
22. 501 Commons HandsOn Tech brown bag Website Strategy
Q & A
Thank You!
Barbara Pritchard
barbaraYpritchard@gmail.com
Alex Green
alex@501commons.org
23. 501 Commons HandsOn Tech brown bag Website Strategy
Resources
We can help you further!
• For info on:
o Future workshops on technological applications, social
media methods, and other topics
o Participating in a free tech assessment of your nonprofit
• Contact us: vistatech@501Commons.org
Editor's Notes
Intro – about me and about the session.
Intro – about me and about the session.
When kicking off a new website or planning a redesign of an existing site, one of the toughest areas you’ll face is just where to begin. Today we’ll go over a few things you can do that will help you develop your strategy and be able to effectively work with designers and developers to achieve your digital goals.
All the topics we’ll discuss lead to the overarching goal of developing your sites information architecture so I want to make sure everyone knows this term. Some people equate it to Site Maps, but it’s so much more. Everything we’ll touch on today is part of IA planning.
Stakeholders offer expertise and insight into what their specific digital needs are. These are casual conversations with a single individual or a small group. If possible have someone with you that can take notes allowing you to focus on the conversation.
Stakeholders offer expertise and insight into what their specific digital needs are. These are casual conversations with a single individual or a small group. If possible have someone with you that can take notes allowing you to focus on the conversation.
Survey’s are a great way to gauge the priorities of your website users. There are free tools out there, such as Surveymonkey.com that allow you easily gather this data. User testing can be done on your site, but also consider seeing how user interact with competitor sites during your planning phase.
Personas give you a “real” person that keeps you focused and helps when you are making design decisions.
A Heuristic Evaluation can be done on your existing site, but I also recommend that you do it on competitor sites. You may discover that a feature or design you admired, isn’t achieving the goals. This exercise can help you determine what does and doesn’t work based on the scenarios you created for your personas.
There are a number of templates online for Heuristic evaluation. With a simple google search you can find a few. This is one of my favorites. With each one take specific notes on why you ranked it the way you did.
What we’ve discussed are tools and tips on how to wrap your head around your site planning. I’m not going to dive into these topics, but I wanted to provide you with a few terms you’ll hear in reference to web design. I’m then curious to hear from you if you’d like any of these topics to offered in a separate presentation.
