Planning & Strategy
Understand the baseline
Undertand objectives, assets, and user needs
Organization: What is your mission?
Website: How will you use your website? What are your organizational objectives? What will you do online to support those objectives?
Audience: What do your audiences want? How will you support their needs using your website?
Surveying Users’ Needs
Research your audience and ask them what THEY want on your site:

stats analysis
online surveys
focus groups
task analysis
cognitive walkthroughs
user scenarios
personas

Visual Design
Create a visual identity, reflect brand, unify the user experience
Organizational structure ≠ ideal …

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Good Online Engagement: What Is It?
Attract prospects, drive traffice & collect email addresses
Engage involved prospects, interact via web and email
Commit supporters, online action (donation/petition)
Retain committed supporters, personalized web content/email contact
Plan to Succeed

Mission-based communications vision
Organizational goals
Departmental goals

Strategic
Operational

Plans to achieve goals

Example:

Strategic goal: provide regular updates to stakeholders
Operational offline goal: produce quarterly print newsletter
Operational online goals: weekly website content updates, monthly e-newsletter, action alerts as appropriate
Include who, why, when how

What is Your Organizational Capacity?

Database
Established strategies
Operations (staff & technology)
Time
Money

Reflect
Are your goals in balance …

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Background
Podcasts are becoming more mainstream. People could be consuming podcasts without even realizing it. It is perfectly acceptable to ease your way into podcasting and slowly grow; start with simple tools and build from there.
Planning a Podcast

Strategize

Write down some goals and track your progress

Focus on your audience (the constituents you want to attract or who are already involved)

Find out what they are already listening to so you can determine themes you may want to embed in your own messages

Consider your …

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Branding
(And how does it connect to your website?)

Elements of a strong nonprofit brand:

Organizational: vision mission, values, objectives, audiences
Conceptual: personality, positioning statement — internal only
Visual: logo, colors, fonts, imagery
Written: name, tagline, mission statement, key messages, boilerplate
Spoken: elevator pitch
Experiential: programs spaces, website, social media, print, phones

Determine Your Audience’s Needs

Google Analytics
Surveys
Create user persona(s)

write up story about who your users are
what’s their age, comfort level with the web, etc.

User testing

sit next to someone and do a website scavenger hunt
ex: if you wanted to donate …

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Answering foundational questions early in the process will:

Set you on the right path
Help you sift through technology decisions, especially giant feature lists
Support you if a crisis arises

Questions to Answer
If you don’t answer these questions sooner, you will answer them later.
An answer is better than no answer
It’s about process, research, analysis, discussion, alignment.
Who?
Clients? Donors? Advocates? Activists? Volunteers?
Who are they in terms of age, gender, profession, social technographics (how they participate online)?
If your potential community members exist on Facebook, but you have …

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