Nonprofit Website Redesign: Frequently Asked Questions

I've been helping clients redesign websites for over twenty years, and even though the technology and web landscape have changed dramatically, many of the same questions keep coming up. Keep reading for answers to the top questions I get today from nonprofits looking to redesign and improve their website.

Questions, Better Questions & Answers

With this FAQ article, I want to address the top questions I get about website redesigns and propose some questions I think would be more effective for sharpening your nonprofit website redesign. Nonprofits typically know their audience, message, and mission well. They need the most help with leveraging technology to reach their goals and effectively engage with their community.

ArcStone helps by providing great tools and technology that can move your mission forward. Website redesigns are very complicated projects. Sometimes, the questions I get are in the right vein but miss the mark on what nonprofits need to know for a successful website redesign.

So here are the top five questions I typically get, the alternative questions I think nonprofits should be asking, and the answers.

#1 How much will my website redesign cost?

Cost is the first question I get, and for a good reason. A nonprofit typically works on a tight budget and wants to spend its donor dollars responsibly. I get it, and I would like to propose what I feel is an even better question.

How Much Should My Website Redesign Cost?

By shifting the question slightly, you can get a more holistic vision of what to expect from your redesign based on your budget. Answering this question will not only provide a dollar amount but a right-sized approach to the redesign project. Not every nonprofit needs a fifty thousand dollar website to meet their goals and provide an effective online platform to push their mission forward. 

Some nonprofits will need a website that costs over fifty thousand depending on what they want the website to do for their organization. 

Every budget discussion I lead starts with goals. 

• What are the goals of your organization overall?
• How will the website support your goals?
• What value are you expecting your website to deliver?
• What initiatives does the website need to support?
• What ROI are you comfortable with for the website?

My Answer & Advice

My answer is to budget enough for a website redesign that meets your expected ROI and supports your goals. My advice is to consider your entire digital presence and the maintenance and support your new website will need after launch.

The best approach is what I call a "gardeners mindset ." You need to plant the garden (build a new website), water it, weed it and fertilize it. Those post website launch tasks will also consume budget and are necessary to leverage the full potential of your redesigned website.

Another key strategy to budgeting for a nonprofit website redesign is prioritizing and phasing out the approach if needed. It's much better to do an excellent job with the first phase of your website project than cram all the work into one project and produce a weaker final product. I always encourage clients to shoot for the moon and dream up an ideal website to understand that some features may need to be pushed into a second phase if the budget is insufficient.

#2 How can the website handle donations?

Most nonprofits I work with use their website as a vehicle to help collect donations. Many times nonprofits have used a third-party donation platform for a while. They are interested in how they may better integrate their donation platform with the new website or collect donations right on the website.

This question is more technical, and I feel it misses the mark on the true power of your website to drive donations. Collecting donations online is trivial; technology is no longer a significant roadblock. I'm proposing a broader question that is less technical and more foundational.

How can the website drive donations?

This question isn't technical and frames the website as a critical piece of your fundraising strategy. If a potential donor decides to make a very generous gift to your organization, do you care if the donation happens online versus sending a check?

Your website can be a convenient way to collect online donations. It can help drive and sustain donor growth through effective design and content.

My Answer & Advice

My answer to this question is to include content in the new website that tells a compelling story around the need your organization fills, how you address these needs, the impact your organization has, and how donor dollars are leveraged.

My advice is also to consider how the website can support sustained donor growth by speaking directly to the donor audience and offering a variety of ways to engage and support the overall donor relationship.

#3 What content should be on the new website?

Content is, of course, a significant consideration when it comes to a nonprofit website redesign. Many nonprofits use a website redesign project as an opportunity to refresh their content and add new information.

Before we launch into writing website content or decide on the top navigation items, a much more critical question needs to be answered: who is our intended audience?

What audiences are the new website serving?

Before you decide on navigation structure or homepage content, it's vitally important to revisit your core audiences and make sure the new website serves those audiences well. Even if you have existing persona documents, things have likely changed since the last website launch. A website redesign project is a perfect time to dust off those old documents and revalidate the approach to content. 

Nonprofits also often have multiple audiences that need to be supported by the website. Donors, volunteers, program participants, and other core audiences need to be served well to have a successful website redesign. 

My Answer & Advice

My answer to this question is to revisit your core audience information and make sure your new web site's content is laser-focused on speaking to your personas effectively. After revalidating the audience information, you will discern what content will best serve visitors to the new website.

My advice is to pay close attention to what content currently performs well on your existing website. Most current content will likely need some form of updating but retaining your high-performing content in some form is a great way to conserve budget and increase the chances of that content continually providing your organization value.

#4 How can the new website get more traffic?

Many times, nonprofits expect to increase their website traffic by embarking on a website redesign project and improving the website's overall user experience and content. This makes a lot of sense, and no one ever expects a better website to get less traffic. 

However, not all website traffic is created equal. Website analytics are far more complicated and nuanced than most nonprofit communication directors realize. While it's generally true that a well-executed website redesign project will increase traffic to the website, I am more concerned with the quality of traffic. 

How can the new website get better traffic?

If your new website redesign results in a 5% drop in traffic but a 15% increase in donations, you probably wouldn't be very upset. Nonprofits often need our help to analyze and report on website traffic data to make sense of it and adjust content or strategy.

For instance, if pages per session drop by one or .5 but most other metrics are up, this can be a sign that the new website is less confusing and offers better pathways to the information visitors are seeking.   

My Answer & Advice

My answer to this question is to optimize your content and navigation to serve key audiences well and offer accessible pathways to the most critical areas of the website. I include in "content" the META content of your website pages, consisting of the title tag and description.

My advice is to align your page content, META content, and keyword strategy so that users seeing your website in search engine results pages are presented with a compelling and accurate preview of what they will find after clicking the link. 

#5 On what CMS should we build the new website?

Answer: WordPress. 

All joking aside, the answer to this question is almost always WordPress. Nonprofits who build their websites on WordPress have considerable advantages in several essential areas like SEO, accessibility, fundraising, multimedia, engagement, and more.

Occasionally it may make sense to build the website on a marketing automation platform like HubSpot, but it's rare and usually much more costly. A better option for the vast majority of Nonprofits who want to take advantage of the incredible power HubSpot brings to their marketing efforts is to use HubSpot in conjunction with WordPress. HubSpot has a WordPress plugin that's free and works very well. You can truly get the best of both worlds by using these two platforms together.

Additional Questions

Even if you found this article very helpful, I'm sure you have a million more questions about website redesigns.

We have a free on-demand webinar where I walk through our entire website redesign process, and please feel free to reach out to ArcStone if you have an upcoming website redesign project you would like to discuss.