9 Months to improve our website

Building a new vision for The Prince’s Trust website

I’ve recently taken on management of The Prince’s Trust website. Over the past few months, I’ve learnt that it can be quite slow, not the easiest to navigate, and certainly not the freshest of designs.

It has potential though. There’s some inspiring content on there, it gets plenty of traffic, and a high % of programme enquiries come online.

This potential hasn’t been fulfilled for several reasons: a lack of investment, commitments to other longstanding digital projects, and a phased restructuring within the organisation that will fundamentally change how the charity operates.

The organisation’s new strategy includes one ambitious goal… In the last 40 years, The Trust has reached a million young people. In the next decade, it wants to reach another million.

Digital will play a big part in this. After a bit of lobbying, I’ve secured some investment to develop the website — but what next?

Pre-democracy

Due to the current restructure, team strategies will look much different in nine months from now. The website needs a lot of groundwork too. I aim to use the rest of the financial year to implement some more sustainable processes than were previously in place. This includes opening up a backlog to the organisation but also defining a vision for the next 9 months.

Come Jan/Feb 2019, I’ll take a more democratic approach to visioning for the next FY. For the time being, what does this vision look like?

The Vision

A website that’s easy for users to sign up *

Whether it’s young people signing up to a programme, or someone looking to volunteer — the website will be positioned as an “acquisition platform” (and not just advertise the work of The Trust).

How are we going to measure this?

Last year users had a 1.72% chance of making a programme enquiry or referring someone to The Trust. This year we’ll be aiming for 2.33% — representing a 36% increase in line with the organisational goals over the next year.

We’ll also be looking at conversion on users who interact with specific content. The website has numerous purposes and distinguishing the motives of different users can be difficult. For instance, a user could be signing up to a charity run whilst another user could be a potential beneficiary looking to make an enquiry. We can make this distinction by looking at the pages they interact with. It’s an imperfect metric but one that will give us a solid indication of our progress.

Note that broader conversion goals are based on new users rather than sessions — “converters” will have plenty of reason to revisit the website once they’ve made an enquiry.

A website that’s easy to navigate

Sounds obvious… but it will force us to look at how we frame our content, its relevance, and the structure of user journeys on the website.

How are we going to measure this?

Last year the average bounce rate for the website was 51%! This year we’ll be aiming to cut this down to 41%. This can be achieved by:

– Focusing on the optimisation of the most visited pages;

– Culling unnecessary pages that duplicate information elsewhere on the site;

– Honing our marketing propositions and drilling down into the purpose of why users visit content.

Last year the average page load speed for the website was 5.25s. This year we’ll be aiming to cut this down to 4.28s. Again, this will be achieved with a focus on the optimisation of our most visited pages. Additionally, we’ll also:

– Clean up some Javascript and tracking that slows down rendering;

– Looking at other metrics related to initial render & interactions;

– Review our current mobile CSS design.

A website that evolves

The website has been in limbo for the last few years. Content has been added, but functionality and approach has remained the same. From time to time, a bespoke piece of work will be implemented with no long-term benefit to users — the equivalent of a garden with no lawn or decking, but the occasional orchid planted in clay soil.

The new strategy aims to put in place sustainable processes and a clear direction for the website. The health of these processes will ultimately be the measure of how the website evolves. In a later blog, I’ll detail what we’re doing behind the scenes to get rid of the clay soil and lay down that lovely lawn!

*Some of these metrics will need final reviewing and finessing!