If you need to get 20 nonprofit executives and board members in a room at once, just yell "we're thinking about launching a new website" and watch them all converge. New websites bring out the opinions, ideas, and requirements from all corners of your organization. And while you want to hear all of that input, you need to move the project forward, too. We'll use examples from our experiences with nonprofits, colleges and universities to offer best practices for wrangling a group of stakeholders.

1. Herding Cats:
How to Get 20 Nonprofit Stakeholders to
Agree to Your New Website
NONPROFIT TECHNOLOGY CONFERENCE
March 15, 2014

2. Senior Vice President, Client Services
Email: nlind@phase2technology.com
Nicole Lind

3. PHASE2TECHNOLOGY.COM

4. About Phase2
• 100+ person application development firm using open source since 2001
• Full-service firm providing digital strategy, design and software development &
integration services
• Primary verticals include: Publishing & Digital Media, Nonprofits & Government
& Public Policy
• Headquartered in Washington DC with offices in New York City, San Francisco,
and Portland. We also have a nationwide staff presence including Georgia,
Indiana, Texas, Florida, Illinois and Minnesota

5. Our Nonprofit Clients

6. Session Goals
• Explore unique challenges of building websites and web
enterprises in the nonprofit space
• Learn solutions for tackling the challenges of building
websites and web enterprises in the nonprofit space

7. Challenges

8. Numerous Stakeholders
Lack of Digital Strategy
Intense Cost Justification
Lack of Technical Experience

9. Numerous Stakeholders
• Characteristics of the problem
• 20 people will not decide on one vision to create a set of
requirements which is critical to building technology
• aka - Voices from the shadows syndrome
• Creates last minute crisis and assassination attempts on your
site launch

10. Lack of Digital Strategy
• Characteristics of the problem
• Not knowing answers to questions like what is primary goal of
the website...Create awareness, collect donations, easy
administration????????
• aka - I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up syndrome
• Creates demoralization in web teams and confusion in certain
sections of the organization

11. Intense Cost Justification
• Characteristics of the problem
• Nonprofits are inherently very money conscious and need more
of their dollars “going to the cause” and a website is often hard
to justify when the cost is higher than expected
• aka - What comes first, the chicken or the egg syndrome
• Creates unfinished web solutions so the metrics can never be
generated to justify the cost of a robust solution that would
essentially help move the nonprofits cause forward

12. Lack of Technical Experience
• Characteristics of the problem
• Nonprofits are extremely complex organizations and their web
needs are no longer just for basic brochureware. Enterprise and
integrated solutions are becoming more of the norm
• aka - Websites are so easy to build and anyone can do it
syndrome
• Creates broken and non-integrated data between the website,
back office and legacy solutions like CRM and donation systems
which of course basically drives the cost up of the entire
enterprise

13. Solutions

14. Establish Rules of Engagement
Get very early buy in for your governance plan

15. Must Have A Single Point of Contact
(POC)
This person should be technical enough and business
savvy

16. Communicate, Communicate, and
Communicate Again
Create published meeting schedule, central repository
for project updates, internal marketing and training
programs

17. Conduct A Formal Discovery
Get documented metrics for success, content and design
strategy, user stories and business requirements,
technical architecture, schedule, estimate and then get
sign-off from ALL the stakeholders

18. Visuals and Demos Are a Must
Create a simple one page map of the web ecosystem,
demo how workflow will work for various stakeholders

19. Manage to the Triangle

20. Avoid Making A Bad Decision By Going
With Someone/Firm Without Nonprofit
“Enterprise” Experience

21. Questions & Dialogue

22. Additional notes that came out of the session:
A request was made for some slides from a old presentation of mine about personality types
(which in the deck I called tribe members) and there is a bunch of stuff on risk as well. The content
of the deck is on Drupal Migration but is pretty much able to be tied to other technology efforts.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/86155027/I-m-Leaving-You-The-Risks-of-Dumping-Your-Old-CMS-for-
Drupal-and-How-to-Manage-Them
Key topics to study up on:
-Project Portfolio Management
-Project Methodology
-Project Management Triangle
!
Searching for tools: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_project_management_software