What first comes to your mind when you encounter the word “design”? Most probably you are thinking about designers, artists, creative activities, and other art-related things. You are right, of course, when you are working on the visual side of something the process always includes creativity but good design is efficient which means a well-designed website is a tool – not just a piece of art.
How can a poor website design affect your nonprofit?
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The most important feature of each social organization is its reputation. A bad website almost equals a bad reputation. A bad reputation makes you look bad and incompetent to donors which means you might get no funds, no supporters, and no chance to fulfill your goal and mission. We do not want this, do we? So let us concentrate on the website design – it does really matter.
Do you need a big budget and much time to get a well-designed website?
Not really. What you really need is an efficient website that is based on the properly prepared technical task, user flow, and user journey maps. Your website should have optimal structure, be logically implemented, have easy navigation, contain clear and precise calls to action, and feature branded colors, fonts, and visual elements (icons, infographics, illustrations, photos, videos, and so on). This is a basic set of website elements that are not difficult to be designed and implemented by a good nonprofit web design firm, agency, or team.
Should I research anything before designing a website?
Yes, definitely! Research is the basic step that is always included in the nonprofit web design process whether you create a simple squeeze page or a multi-paged website. Each web design agency starts work with the question of why you need a website. Only then, using properly selected functional and marketing tools they start creating a layout and putting together your website piece by piece. So that in the end, you would get a completely independent tool that you can lead people to, inform them about something, or complete other social and marketing objectives you have defined for your organization.
Except for the question of why you need a website you should be prepared to give some information about your audience, the specifics of your activities, workflow details, and so on. If you are creating a website or completing the “analysis” stage by yourself then those questions are the researches you need to conduct. The results of those researches will help you get the website you need – not just a website.
How a good website will help my nonprofit organization?
Your website will, first of all, reflect the mission of your organization, let people get to know you and your goal, your mission and reveal opportunities they have with your organization. A personal website helps build a good reputation and collect social proof each nonprofit needs to report on its activities and show the social impact it has with those activities.
Using visual interactive tools it will be easier to deliver the social message to the visitors of your website because it will be clearly presented, using the best digital design tools.
Well-designed nonprofit website will also help the audience recognize and remember your organization or initiative (depending on what you create a website for). Also, you will be able to get more and bigger donations as people will trust you more, as well as the process of donating, will be easier and more clear for them.
When a nonprofit web design is implemented on the webpage or website correctly then it kind of smoothly guides a person through it, showing them the destination and at the same time making this journey pleasant, interesting, and informative.
How can I use a website?
There are no limits on the ways you could use a well-designed website. Digital solutions have everything to complete any functional feature required for social organizations. For example 7 out of 10 donors become actual donors and are more likely to become regular ones in case the donations can be done through a branded web page. Generally, a branded page/website converts visitors into donors almost twice more often as an automatically generated page elsewhere.
People who are looking for volunteering options also tend to choose organizations that have their personal websites. Why is it like this? Because first of all, they can find more information about the company, its social impact, projects, initiatives, reports, and so on. Second, nonprofits usually publish information about volunteering options which gives visitors an idea to join and support the organization on a voluntary basis. And the last but not less important point is trust. Volunteers want to know that they will be also able to make a change when joining you so they would like to see not only content generated by you but also reviews and feedback from other volunteers, partners, or supporters that have been involved in common activities with you. If they can follow a link and check your social media it will be an additional tool to increase their trust level.
Informing the world about what you do is also a thing you can cover with your website. When you generate the content you can present it in a nice and easy-to-perceive way, using various design and formatting options. Here a good design works for you as well.
Promotion of your website is a good way to promote your services, ideas, and so on. Whether you choose SEO or Google Ads or any other marketing tool a website will be the main platform used for it. Here design is very important too as the website should be optimized for promotion technically.
As you see, nonprofit web design is very important for websites of social organizations or projects. It should be not only taken into consideration but also used properly as it helps you get fantastic results.
