It’s Lonely Out in Cyberspace. Does Your Website Have Friends?
By Jonah Goodman
Your website is likely one of the most valuable tools for your organization. It is an entry point to many critical tasks like communicating your mission, engaging your community, raising money to run your organization, and so much more. However, while it might be the tool where you invest the most resources, it’s important to remember it shouldn’t live alone.
Successful organizations know a website doesn’t live alone in their activism ecosphere. They take a broader view, considering things like social media, printed brochures, and email marketing — and how each of those channels interweave with each other. In short — they don’t rely solely on their website to communicate their message.
Here are five tips you can use to make sure your website isn’t operating as a silo.
1. Develop a communication plan to convey your organization’s message
Your organization needs to understand its messaging first and foremost. That might be something timely and topical, such as communicating a fundraising drive around Giving Tuesday, or something more evergreen. Your website should be one source for delivering that message, but you should also be communicating via social media, direct mail, events, email, etc.
There are several benefits to having numerous channels that can speak to your audience.
- They reinforce and amplify each other
- They connect different audiences to your message
- They deliver different types of content and are digested differently
- They speak in a unified voice that is reflective of the entire organization and not just individual teams
2) Understand your analytics
Institutional ‘wisdom’ and anecdotal data can be very valuable when supported by real numbers.
Websites are often put into their silos when we have anecdotal data but not analytic data around user behavior and needs. Your organization may think your users engage with different channels and content in a specific way, but it is necessary to regularly ask “how do we know that?” While website and communications strategies may have come from hard data at one point in time, it is good to continuously reaffirm and challenge what we think we know.
Analytics can either prove that your strategy is correct or that it needs to change. Either outcome is beneficial because you will know you are investing resources to fulfill your organization’s core mission. Building a culture of embracing data to inform decisions can be a great way to break through your content silos, and grow your organization.
3) Understand How Your Audiences Interact with Your Organization
With your website analytics you can understand who your audiences are and their various engagement preferences. You can then create conversion strategies to invite them to join your email list, follow you on social media, and even to encourage them to visit your website more frequently.
As you think about building these paths your users take to get to content, keep in mind the goal is engagement with your organization and its mission. You don’t want to build strategies that just send users to your website for the sake of inflating traffic. Similarly, you don’t want to post Facebook content on your Twitter account for the sole purpose of moving the conversation elsewhere.
If you have the resources to dig deeper into your analytics, you might find, for example, that your Facebook followers are strong advocates for sharing your message to new people. Or, that your email recipients are very active in advocating your message to key influencers or decision makers.
Not only do your audiences use your communication channels differently, but you should understand WHY that is valuable to your organization. M+R Strategies has this bit of advice: “Use Facebook to reach everyboooooody, and Twitter to develop stronger, 1–1 relationships”
When crafting your marketing strategy it can be easy to forget about one key audience — potential new supporters. M+R Strategies has a great article about this often forgotten goal — that building content for channels other than your website can help you reach out to new targets: “It’s one of the best things about social media: you’re reaching people you otherwise might not have access to. And it’s a good reminder that your social media content could be the first impression you make on a potential supporter.”
4) Reach Your Audience Where They’re Most Likely to Hear You
Your message should be crafted and delivered to your audience based on where they want to engage with you. Your audiences will show you how they want to engage with you by the channels they follow, like, visit, and sign up on. For some that may very conceivably be email on their morning commute, your website when they are at their desk during the day, your social accounts on their lunch break, and then in person at your event that evening. If you try to force them to go to just one channel or even a channel they aren’t on, you risk not engaging with them at all.
Al Jazeera, for example, does this well. The AJ+ channel on Facebook is one of Facebook’s biggest video content creators. That content lives on Facebook, and is uniquely made for that audience. Al Jazeera, traditionally known as a television news station, expanded their reach by understanding which audience groups interacted with each specific marketing channel. They then curated specific content for each channel to speak very directly to that audience.
5) Always be engaging and curating
Your website, social accounts, and email list are not something you set up once and forget about. They are living content, not dusty archives. To properly support them and your audiences you need to be continually creating new content. Having a larger digital presence (in addition to an offline presence) should mean more engagement opportunities, not more silos.
As you think about your strategy, remember that engagement means curating specific content for each specific channel. Simply having a website does not keep your audiences engaged, and you’ll lose out on fulfilling your organization’s mission.
Creating content unique to each audience and each marketing channel can be resource intensive, but the rewards are worth it. Take the time to plan and do your research. This will ensure that your website and other marketing efforts don’t live in a silo, and your communications strategy will better serve your organization’s mission.
Jonah Goodman is a Sr. Designer at Teal Media, a full-service creative agency with a conscience. We pour every ounce of our passion and skill toward your success, because we, too, want the world to be a better place. We believe purposeful design can transform organizations, inspire action, and enable progress.
Learn more at TealMedia.com and find us on Facebook and Twitter.
