Improve your website with a simple audit

How well is your digital strategy working? Are all your digital channels - including your website, email, social networks, and satellite sites - integrated and optimized to provide the most value to your organization at the lowest effort in these lean times?

To find out how you’re doing, start with an audit. Answering a few simple questions will help identify doable actions to focus resources on areas that are working best, extend the life of your current website, and provide greater value from digital.

So, what are some of those questions? We’ve boiled them down to 6:

1) Do you know your audience?

Most non-profits or social venture businesses make assumptions about who their community of supporters are. But what are the people you value most really coming to your site for? Are you meeting their needs in a nanosecond? Know your audience, speak to them, meet their needs, and you will build deeper trust and stronger relationships.

• Talk to your users. Find out, in plain terms, what they need from you.
• Do some unofficial usability testing on your site, asking them to accomplish a task. You’ll be amazed and humbled by the results.
• Run a simple site survey like 4Q to find out why people are visiting your site, what they love and what they hate.

2) Does your website deliver on core goals of your organization or campaign?

Digital channels are likely the primary way people engage with your organization today. As your organization changes, does your site reflect your greatest successes, issues of highest importance or new products and services that are the most successful? Are you tracking metrics that matter, and communicating them in language your leadership will understand? If you don’t sell the importance of the digital channel, and make the connection to core goals, it won’t get the investment it needs, or worse be cut in tough times.

• Highlight your most important and vital messages and actions. Cut the clutter (which probably means hurting some people’s feelings, so be it).
• Track Key Performance Indictors (KPIs) for how digital delivers for your organization.
• Make sure decision makers understand how digital is performing and invest proactively in improvement.

3) Does your website have clear calls to action?

The majority of our work is about finding ways to creatively and effectively engage our client’s audiences and drive site visitors to take action. All too often there are too many things to do on a site, so nothing important gets done. Your website needs to focus its attention on highlighting the two or three key actions you need people to take, then creating a friction-free experience for them to accomplish those tasks. In the words of jazz great Charles Mingus, “Making the simple complicated is common place; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that is creativity.”

• Identify one to three key actions to highlight on your website (or for complex organizations, for each section of your site).
• Link the actions to your organization or campaign’s core goals.
• Make it is obvious and easy for supporters to take these actions. Again, cut the clutter.

4) How will your audience come back?

A lot of organizations get stuck just trying to get supporters to take action and don’t think about building a plan for long-term engagement. You should be thinking about the different degrees of participation your supporters want to have and ensure tools and opportunities are developed that allow them to engage where they are most comfortable. This is called building a ‘ladder of engagement’, and yes, it can be automated using CRM technology.

• Ensure you have created a range of tools and opportunities for your supporters to engage with your organization and issue, at different levels of interest and commitment.
• Identify how you will track engagement.
• Build a plan for building long-term relationships that entices supporters up your ladder.

5) Are you listening to what your audience is saying?

Monitoring social networks and listening to the conversations taking place within them is an excellent way to find out what people think about your organization and issue. Learning what your supporters are talking about and finding out how they want to engage with you can directly inform what ‘rungs’ you build into your ladder of engagement. The stronger your ladder, the more successful your organization or campaign will become.

• Find our where your supporters hang out online and what social networks are they a part of.
• Visit these often and become part of the conversation.
• Integrate what you learn to change what your organization thinks/says/does (now that’s the hard one!).

6) Where are you losing visitor traffic and conversions?

Organizations are complex. This complexity unfortunately often carries over into the structure and design of websites, which often results in a confusing experience and failure to convert visitors into supporters. Are people getting lost in your internal language/department structure? Are your form pages turning away potential donors? Are your action pages not getting people to take action? Employing simple language your audiences use, simplifying online forms, making catchy graphics for key actions and following best practices for design and usability will go a long way to driving more value from digital.

• Set up and analyze “goal pages” in your analytics software.
• Test your site to see if visitors understand what you want them to do.
• Remove any roadblocks that prevent those actions from being taken.
• Use images that clearly reflect actions you want people to take.

Pulling it all together

Your organization can benefit from looking deeply at these key question areas to tighten up how your website performs as a key tool within your digital strategy. Examine these important points for yourself, or give us a ring and we would be happy to do it for you.