Rethinking Web strategy for nonprofits: The New Best Practices (3/3)

Build for the behavior your want. The way a website works has a powerful effect on how people interact with it. Beyond usability, it’s creating a place so compelling that it elicits curiosity and seemingly-inevitable action.

Consider two best practice examples:

Fundaising / External Behavior

WeCanBuildAnOrphanage.com is an old-fashioned barnraising. Three people rallying thousands to build a home for AIDS orphans. The site is aimed at grassroots fundraising – at raising money a brick, diaper, a bottle at a time:

But this is the compelling part of the build:

Don’t just write a check, drag and drop the contribution you want to make. Literally buy the bricks that will build the walls that protect the kids.

Community Building / Internal Behavior

My home agency actually worked on this one. The Women’s Fund of Central Ohio – a foundation investing in social change for women and girls - not only built a new Website, they built new expectations for how they’d interact with their community.

The entire site is built on the blog-engine Wordpress, giving them access to lots of free plugins and widgets (search, photo hosting, email updates) and a built-in content management and reporting system.

Smart use of resources to be sure. But, more than that, it’s creating a new behavior among the staff – knighting them all as bloggers who update the site consistently, sharing their work and time with their community. And, making it easy – or even obvious – to integrate with social tools, promoting events through email, sure, but also on Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Comments

[flosslounge]

Wow!!This is creativity at its very best. I am very impressed i had to book mark it.
Regards
flosslounge

[adchick]

Your blog is not only enlightening, you do the world a great service by sharing this sort of information. Thank you! Valuable stuff I am discussing with my favorite nonprofit here in Hooterville, the local women's shelter. Keep it coming. I learn so much!

[Tova]

Hi! This is a really great and special ad, thought you might like it!

http://se.youtube.com/watch?v=uyfAXJsKzOM&fmt=18

[josh]

I love the work on The Women’s Fund of Central Ohio... Great simple idea which really integrates social media platforms

[Liv]

I really love the design of the wecanbuildanorphanage.com site. It's a great example of how you can easily get across what you're about, what you're trying to achieve and how you can be involved all on one page! Great use of drag & drop functionality too. Keep up the non profit posts, they're really insightful!

[Erin Toberman]

do you know who built the website for wecanbuildanorphanage.com? I would like to contact them.

[Todd Schnick]

I enjoyed your three-part series for non-profits. I have shared them with my organization: http://www.furniturebankatlanta.org/

We provide furniture for families and individuals just out of homelessness or fleeing domestic violence.

What do you think about offering people a chance to personally select (thru an online donation) furniture for families? Such as selecting twin beds for children, a kitchen table set for a family, or a sofa for a young couple...

And does personalizing it make a difference in increasing contributions? (something like "This furniture was donated by the Smith Family")

What do you think?

[Marti Bledsoe Post, The Women's Fund of Central Ohio]

At The Women's Fund, we created blog/social media guidelines for our bloggers, an editorial calendar to keep things straight, and we "practiced" by sending each other draft posts via email long before the site was up and running. All of it has paid off as we've launched.

[raincoaster]

Shared access and buy-in across an organization is a very, very powerful thing. Do you have any tips on managing it? I'm finding a lot of crossed signals and duplication and some tips on communication around this would be very helpful.