8 things to think about if your charity is going to rebuild its website

Lots of charities are in the process of redeveloping their website. Here are just a few ideas on things to think about before you do so…

1. If looking at external support, decide whether you want an agency to help you explore what’s needed (more expensive but you get a better end product) or if you want them to build exactly what you want to specify (cheaper but you won’t get the most for your money). Most agencies will offer a Discover -> Define -> Design / Deliver type process, with you able to pick and choose where you start with them from.
2. Content takes the longest time to rework and is the most important. Get everyone in your organisation ready for and bought into this, with resources set aside for it.
3. Getting different digital tools to talk to one another (integrations) are usually the trickiest thing for developers to do — work that out (probably with your IT team) before you start for a more accurate quote.
4. Work out if you want your own tools or 3rd party tools e.g. JustGiving vs your own Donate / payment functionality. The benefits of your own are that you can customise the whole experience but they’re expensive to build, maintain and don’t have the lessons that one used by lots of organisations do.
5. Do you want a rebrand and a new website or just a website? It’s often tempting to get your agency to ‘refresh’ your brand whilst they design the website. This is a great idea, but you’ll need to set budget aside to ensure a quality job rather than something that’s half thought through.
6. Get a panel of users (and internal champions) lined up to test your designs / work on.
7. Get your Fundraising and ‘Service’ teams excited about the project and ensure they’ve fed into the brief so you can call on them later on.
8. Set your KPIs up front and measure how your current website is performing so you know what your benchmarks are. Avoid using ‘vanity metrics’ like page views for these KPIs, the most useful are things like page specific conversion rates and bounce rates.

If you or anyone in your organisation would like to talk through these ideas or any others you’ve had then please get in touch with us on james@williamjoseph.co.uk