Hannah Brazee Gregory and Kyle Gregory
If you have been urging your nonprofit to develop a new website, but have gotten nowhere, bring this top-10 list to your next staff meeting to garner some laughs and jumpstart the conversation.
The top-10 reasons your nonprofit needs a new website:
10. Your website and social media don't speak the same language and can't get along.
9. Your website assumes that visitors are willing to wait several minutes for everything to load, and doesn't care that its programming and graphics files are the cause. (Your web statistics indicate that 95 percent of your visitors don't get past the homepage.)
8. You have absolutely no idea how to log in to make changes and your volunteer website administrator stopped returning your calls six months ago.
7. Your nonprofit's website looks exactly like your brochure, with no more and no less information and photographs.
6. Everything is a downloadable PDF file.
5. Your homepage reminds you of when you were studying for your SATs - more text and information than is possible to digest.
4. It takes visitors, and you, at least three attempts to successfully click your intended selection on a complicated drop-down menu. (Keep trying - you'll catch that link!)
3. An over-zealous intern or volunteer installed a fancy flash introduction that makes your website look like it is for a video game rather than a nonprofit - and that decreases your traffic by 40 percent to 60 percent.
2. You completely redesigned your logo and look three years ago, but your website still has the logo and look designed 15 years ago.
1. You are being charged by the hour for a web programmer to make all of your changes and updates even though there are free open-source templates with content-management systems built-in.
All joking aside, this is serious business. A website remains the most cost-effective communications tool any organization can utilize - but only if done correctly.Hannah Brazee Gregory and Kyle Gregory are co-founders of Shoestring Creative Group, "the nonprofit's agency."
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Comments
Considering that I mostly work with nonprofits and redesigning their websites, #2 and #6 are pretty common. Even nonprofits can benefit from a well designed, strategically planned site built on open-source platform such as Drupal or WordPress.
Thanks Tim. We always appreciate the feedback, and that is a good idea. We will work on an article like that.
Be sure and follow us on Twitter:
@ShoestringGroup
@NonprofitPRguru
@NonprofitBrands
Thanks!
Hannah Gregory
SHOESTRING | the nonprofit's agency
www.shoestringgroup.com
Hannah, Kyle,
You hit the nose on the head. I mean, aside from laughing with glee while thinking, "YES - I have another resource to point friends, people I help to". You shed some helpful light on what matters within the online communication world.
Perhaps you've already done it, but if you turned this post on its head, what are the 10 signs your Non-Profit site is performing with the effectiveness that it should? Or shorter perhaps: "!0 Signs Your Non-Profit Website is Working" ?
Thanks for contributing world changing content :-)
Tim
@learnerslife
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