 On behalf of TechSoup, we would like to thank you for joining our webinar today. As you know, TechSoup is a nonprofit 501c3 just like you and our mission includes supporting nonprofits, working with technology to build a more equitable planet. And we do this by hosting catalog of technology products, webinars and courses. And we do that with specific brands, major tech brands and one of those brands that's here today called TAC Network. I'm so excited. We're fortunate to have a couple of their team members here with us today. They're gonna share some insights on how your website can help accelerate your outreach, funding and communication impact. But before I do, speaking of webinars and courses, we do have some courses that are coming up that I want to share with you that are very similar to the topic that we're talking about today. I'm gonna put some links in the chat. Some of them are free, some of them you get a discount. And also if you're watching this on the replay, I will be sending these links out to you tomorrow. So before I turn it over to TAC Network, I wanna show you how you can engage if this is your first time here with us today. If you need the closed caption, just tap on that CC button at the bottom of your screen and you'll be able to see the closed caption. Please type your questions in the Q&A. We're gonna try to get your questions throughout the webinar. And if you would learn something, if you're learning something cool today, you would share it with us also if you need it and hashtag us at TechSoup, we would love that. So I'm gonna go ahead and turn it over to Jason and welcome Jason and Melissa. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you, Aretha. We are excited to get started. Melissa, I will wait for you to throw the slides up. You can jump on in. Well, thank you all for joining us today. Looks like everyone is getting in and getting set up. Get your monitor set up where you have everything easy to way to view it. A little agenda for us today, wanna review that. Well, we're gonna start off with brief introductions for both TAP Network, kinda introduce who we are and what we do with our partnership with TechSoup, as well as kinda give you a brief introduction of both myself and Melissa's background. Then we're gonna move right into the key elements or pillars, would you, of what makes an effective nonprofit website. I think that's what everyone's here to really learn about. After that, we'd love to kinda go over the brief benefits of using our growth-driven design methodology and kinda how we design websites and our thought process behind it. So you could maybe use that in your own processes. And lastly, we would like to highlight some of your options that we have partnering-wise with TechSoup should you need help building, fixing or maintaining your own website. We do partner with them for their own and would love to help you do the same. Understand everyone's probably gonna have a lot of questions as we go through. We intended to stop and do Q&A at the end, depending on time, Melissa and I might stop midway and entertain some questions. So with that being said, Melissa, let's jump right through. So tap network. We're a mission-driven marketing and technology agency that is proud to partner with TechSoup now for over seven years. Our mission is to provide nonprofits with affordable access to knowledge, tools and technology from today's fastest growing business sectors so that they can solve society's most pressing challenges. I mean, this includes helping nonprofits develop high-impact websites, software platforms and marketing campaigns to digitally transform and really scale their mission. We know you're supporting our most vulnerable populations and so we wanna help support you. With that being said, I hope our presentation enables you each and every one of you to identify areas where you can improve your website and really grow your mission to make a bigger impact. And now a little bit about us. Hi, everyone. My name is Melissa Pitts. I'm the director of client services for Tap Network. I have a background in digital marketing, advertising and account management coming from the advertising world. I saw how important it was that advertisers of all types were driving people to a website that worked for their business or their organization and how important it was, how crucial of a step having a good website was. So that has really been my focus here in my work with Tap and I've had the opportunity to work with hundreds of nonprofits just like yourselves and I'm excited to share some of what we've learned. A little background on me. So my background really enables me to bring a more unique perspective to a lot of these conversations. I have built a tech stack myself starting off in a small business setting with my own family. So I understand a lot of this constraints your nonprofit likely faces today and just trying to get started or just managing. And I really look forward to sharing the experiences and lessons I've learned over the past couple of years helping hundreds of other organizations successfully implement varying technology solutions to really build out an effective tech stack or platform as we call it. So the combination of multiple softwares, website, et cetera to really drive and run your business. So we want to do a quick poll just to kind of see where everyone stands today. It's always an interesting question. What is the status of your organization's website? Do you have a website or are you looking to create one brand new? We're gonna put this poll out to you. Have you already, do you have a plan or to redesign it or looking to do it in the next 12 months? Currently happy with the website but just need to help updating or you're happy with the website and just hoping we could bring you something interesting. You know, some little tidbit you can add in. We'd love to hear where everyone stands today. And you should see a poll window pop up and you can make a selection. I won't give everyone just a second to do that. And Tom, to your question, the webinar is being recorded. That's all that popped over. All right, we have our results. Just so everyone kind of has the lay of the land here, it looks like about 4% of us don't have a website but are looking to create one. 54% have a website but they plan to redesign or redevelop in the next 12 months. 40% are happy with their current website but know that it needs some adjustments or changes and about 5% are happy with their website as is. Great, thank you everyone. So like Jason mentioned, we're gonna start off with some of the key elements of what makes a great nonprofit website and what we've seen in our experience. Those three elements that we're gonna dive into detail about are scalability and flexibility. So how well does your website grow with your organization? How much, you know, what's its ability to change and adapt as you change and adapt? We're gonna look at user experience for your various target audiences and how to identify those. And then we're gonna look at integration opportunities. So how can your website be a resource for your organization? How can it function as a team member and, you know, really help out in achieving your mission? So at this point, guys, I'm sure some of you are already rolling your eyes like, oh my God, these are a lot of big words. What's going on? I promise you we're not gonna fill today's mission with a whole bunch of tech jargon. That is not the intention. So we will try to keep it as interactive and as understandable as possible. But in this case, when it comes to scalability and flexibility, think of this as kind of laying the foundation for long-term success. Selecting the right CMS and website architecture upfront will allow your organization to continually build upon and update your website to better match your mission. The goal with this process is to eliminate the need to ever have to go back and really rebuild your website from scratch in the future. So we wanna make sure that you're planning ahead, you're doing it properly so that you can continually grow. I'm gonna go ahead and pass the baton over to Melissa, a letter of review. I'll leave each of these in more detail and kind of for better understanding. All right, so we'll start with content management system or you may hear the term CMS. This is gonna be the platform that your website is built on. So kind of the main tool that you're using to put together your site and how all the functionality and content are gonna come together with design. There are a few different options when you're looking at this and a lot of different considerations. So we wanna make sure because we're talking about scalability and flexibility here, we wanna make sure that we're setting ourselves up for success in the future. So it's important to get an idea of all the options that are out there and not just necessarily what's gonna work right now. There are two kind of main categories of content management system that you can consider. Managed content management systems and open source content management system. So you're probably familiar with companies like Wix and Squarespace. These content management systems offer what they call what you see is what you get editors for you to be able to design and build your website with a very little website development technical experience. This is designed for a beginner and a lot of these tools are very robust and can allow you to build a really beautiful website. So just because they're managed does not mean that they are necessarily necessarily any better or superior to the open source content management systems. It's all about the resources and budget available to you. Something to always consider when you're looking at a managed CMS or what are the limitations there? You are because they're providing the technology to you you are limited to the partnerships and integrations that they offer. A lot of times custom coding and things like integrations can be a little bit limited. So consider the systems that you're already working with within your organization and see if your managed CMS of choice works with those systems as well or if you'd need to make a major change. A good example of that would be Wix partners with tools like Constant Contact and MailChimp for email marketing. If you use something else and Wix doesn't have that partnership that might either take some reconfiguring from you or you might have to change to be able to work with Wix. Whereas something like a more custom open source CMS might be able to accommodate more technologies and systems. So something to think about something to do your research on. There's not like I said there's not necessarily a right or wrong choice here but definitely want to make sure you do your research understand your limitations and understand the capabilities. Open source content management systems often require more coding and technical expertise. You will need to partner with a website developer in order to build out a site on these platforms most likely. Our recommendation, as you can see here we do love working with both Wix and WordPress. WordPress is our open source management. Other terms you might hear might be Drupal or Joomla and just kind of giving you an idea of what some of the content management systems you might want to research or look into. WordPress is the most common content management system globally, so that does tend to be our recommendation especially when considering scalability and flexibility. The next piece we want to look at being able to scale is our site architecture. So this is an example of a very high level site map. What does the navigation look like on your website? Something you really want to put some thought into as you're building your site. And this is obviously down the line from choosing your content management systems is going to be a little further along in the process but something you want to consider from a scalability purpose because I know we've all seen websites where people try to continue adding things to their navigation and maybe it's three or four lines long and you can just tell that it's not super organized and it's kind of hard to navigate. So something to think about when you're planning out your site is how can I organize my navigations that it makes sense to my users? And what can I do to scale that as well? So coming up with your key main navigation kind of tabs like we have here in orange. So home about us for nonprofits we really see what we do work as a great main navigation piece, a blog is an awesome way to keep content fresh and up and up and current with your organization. Get involved for things like donate and volunteer and then an easy way to contact. The benefit of an organization structure like this a site architecture like this is that you have the ability to add sub menus or dropdowns underneath those as your website grows. So maybe you start with just the orange pages and over time you build out some of the gray dropdown menu but that's exactly what we're looking for when we talk about scalability. We wanna be able to add pages in the future without throwing off the entire user experience. We want it to still be intuitive as we continue to add content and build over time. Suggestion that our clients often find helpful is this is a little bit of an intense exercise but something that can really help in the early planning stages of your website would be to write all of the pages you'd like to have on your site on index cards and pull in some various people within your organization. It might be people that are staff members, it might be donors, it might be program participants, any sort of constituent, pull them in and have them arrange the index cards in an order that makes sense for them. And I think a lot of times that helps us get perspective besides our own where it's our natural instinct to organize these things in the way that makes sense to us but we're not necessarily our ideal target user. So get some input from your users. The index method is a way to do it. You could also do it in a shared document. You could do it in the spreadsheet but kind of the most visual way to do that is to go ahead and write everything out on index cards. So something worth giving a shot. We put some examples of nonprofit sites that do this well, that have scalable site architectures. And so you can see here, same type of general layout that we talked about home, about news and updates. Join us with that main call to action for Doni. Same type of thing here and then here as well. So just wanna just show you kind of what that looks like visually on a real website. The other piece to consider when we're looking at scalability and flexibility is updates and maintenance. So this is what happens after your website goes live and we're gonna talk about in our methodology, we're gonna talk about the importance of continuing to make updates once your site is launched. This is something you really wanna consider as early as the stage where you're choosing your content management system. You wanna consider your budget and timelines for making updates once the site is live. Do you have the budget to pay a developer or work with a partner? Do you have updates that are urgent that need to get done within an hour's time or do you have a little bit of lead time before things need to get updated? What tools are available to you to make those updates? So does it need to be coded into the site? Do you have kind of a drag and drop visual builder that you're comfortable with? Are you creating a blog post? What does that update look like? And then also your comfort level and your available resources and their comfort level. So you wanna avoid getting in a situation where you don't have anyone that you can reach out to that can make updates and changes in the timeline that works for you or within the budget that works for you. So really considering those things at the beginning of the process to ensure that you're not gonna get a website up and running and then not have time, not have money and not have resources to keep it up to date. So definitely something to keep in mind. Thanks Melissa for kind of going over all that. It's really nice to hear your background having done so many nonprofit sites because you've really helped people navigate around all these landmines. For our next topic, I mean, this is arguably the driver for the entire discussion. It's user experience. Why is user experience so important? It's simple, it's simplicity. If a fifth grader were to get on your website and try to find a specific resource, can they do it easily? And the reason I ask that is because a lot of times we're overworked to have too much on our plate and most people that are hitting your website they're mentally taxed. They wanna have an easy way to connect with the content they're looking for. And that's one of the biggest hurdles and walls that people draw basically between themselves and their constituents. So in order to achieve this, you need to take into consideration your target audience and how they hope to engage with your website. Similar to how what Melissa cited the DIY of writing your site map down on cards. Think of it, make it easy. If the user experience for each of your target audiences is incorporated into your site correctly, the user journey should be intuitive regardless of which constituent or audience type is hitting your website. A great example of that is, your supporters should easily be able to see what impact they're making and where they can donate either their time or funds in the same way that your program participants should easily be able to explore their programs and sign up right there directly. And Melissa, why don't you go ahead and walk us through kind of some of this in more detail. Sure, so something that we recommend as an exercise is kind of similar to our site architecture question, right? So this is gonna happen before you're building your site, maybe before you're determining your site architecture, but it's really important to take a step back and consider who the target audiences are for your organization. So whether you're a new organization or you've been established for quite a while, it's really important to make sure that everyone on your team is on the same page and that your marketing is all speaking to the same target audience, that everyone has the same kind of person in mind. And an exercise that really can help with this is persona development. So a persona is a semi-fictional representation of your key stakeholders. So most organizations are gonna have several personas that they're trying to reach. Each persona is gonna be representative of a target audience. This exercise is actually creating a full person, a fictional person that represents each of those target audiences. So I like to use the example of a donor. So if there are five people on your staff and you all say, are donors and you refer to that target audience very generally, all five of you might have a slightly different idea of who that donor is. Someone might be picturing a corporate donor. So it's a CEO and they spit specific demographics and a specific personality type. Someone else might be picturing a supporter that has been affected by something related to your mission. And that might look totally different. So you're talking to your five staff members but you're all picturing a different donor. So if you were to write content to try to reach those donors, your language is gonna be all over the place. You're messaging the images you use. They're gonna resonate with different people. So it's really important at this step to acknowledge and try to get on the same page about who those people are and developing a persona can really help with that. So what you actually do, and you can kind of see here from this visual, but we go as far when we work with our clients to develop personas, we go as far as, we give our target audiences a name. We give them a picture. We figure out where they live, how old they are, what their education level is. We talk about their background. We come up with a history for them. We also really wanna dive into their needs and motivation so that we can understand why we're talking to them, what information they're looking for and what our goals are for them as an organization. So this persona exercise, well, sometimes it's a little bit silly. It is extremely helpful and it gets everyone all on the same page so that you're all talking to the same target audience. I can really help streamline the process of building a website, creating social media posts, really any of your marketing initiatives are gonna benefit from going through this exercise. We have a link here and we can drop it in the chat as well to the HubSpot persona creator. This is actually going to be a, I'll just drop that in the chat now. This is going to take you to a tool that will help you walk through all the steps of building a persona. So HubSpot provides this free tool where you can enter your name for your persona, you can upload a picture and then it's gonna put it all into a pretty little template at the end that you can save and share with the rest of your organization. So it's a very helpful tool and a process we definitely recommend going through. You might start off with just a few key personas and over time you might develop more specific personas for your audience. The next step in that process, once you have your personas or your target audience is identified would be to create a customer journey map for that persona. So in building out your user experience on your website, it's very, very important that we understand who is coming to our site and what action do we want them to take? Typically that's not gonna happen by just driving the person to your site. So again, using the donor example, just because a potential donor lands on your website that does not mean that they're gonna click make a donation right away. So your user journey and what that user experience looks like is really figuring out filling in the gaps there. So if Donate is touchpoint four and ending up on the website is touchpoint one, what are touchpoints two and three? What does our website need to contain to help our users understand why they should support our organization? What kind of work you do in the community? Anything that they're gonna need to really make that decision, again, in the example of a donor, what they're gonna need to make that decision to actually donate. So that's what our user journey looks like and why it's gonna be beneficial for the user experience on our website. Likely, you have four or five, maybe six competing personas or target audiences that are coming to your website and they all have different needs and motivations. They all have different outcomes as far as what it looks like to interact with your organization and what your goal should be is to make that user experience for each of those audiences just as smooth as the next. So it shouldn't be any easier for a donor to donate than it is for a program participant to read about a program and sign up for it. You want both of those users even though they have different goals to have the same type of simple, straightforward experience on your site. The graphic that I'm gonna show next is anything but simple and straightforward but there is a reasoning behind it. The reason behind it is that we're trying to find all of the possible paths that our persona might take to get to our website, what they might look at once they get there and then the ultimate goal or way that they might interact with our organization. So the reason there's so much here is because we're trying to figure out multiple scenarios to understand what that user might wanna do when they get to our site. So you can see here, we're looking at what happens when someone finds out about our organization, how do they find out about our website? Then you start to move on to once they get to our site in this kind of consideration through application phase, what do they need to see on our website to engage with us? Whether that be joining our email list, making a donation, learning about a program, what kind of content are they looking for on the site? If you're not sure what pages or what content you should create on your site, this is a great exercise to go through to really understand what that should look like. This crazy visual here, if we go ahead and just list out each of these items, this then becomes our content checklist that we can go through and make sure that we're building this content over time so that our users have what they need when they get to our site. Doesn't have to be all at once and you don't have to have all of this on account for every possible scenario just to launch your site. But this is a great way to map out what you'd like to build over time so that when you get to things like building your site architecture, you have in mind how you might grow in the future and what you need to be ready for in order to scale. We're also accounting for here other systems that we're gonna talk about next. We're gonna talk about integrations, but we're accounting for that here as well. So at what parts, at what piece of this journey do our other systems and technologies come in and start to help us out here? So something like a contact relationship management system, at what point do people end up in that system so that we can continue to talk to them and what does that user flow look like as well? So this documents everything from how our organization was advertised or brought to the attention of our users all the way through to how do we continue engaging with them after they've initiated. You know, contact with our organization. And I see a question in the chat about going over one example for the journey mapping. And if you just, I'm assuming that means kind of explaining one of these boxes. So we'll go through, I'll go through one of these journeys. So the idea would be, let's say this is a, this particular user journey is for someone applying for a job. So that could be a job applicant, it could be a volunteer. If we started social posts, that means the person found out about our volunteer opportunity, about our organization from seeing something on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn wherever it may be. So they saw that social post, they came through and that social post linked them to our blog. And one of our blogs was maybe it was a spotlight of one of our other employees. So they can go and they can see, oh, this job's available with this organization. Here is, you know, here's what that person does. Here's what another position does at the organization. Here's why they love working there and here's why I should work there too. There is the ability to go ahead and subscribe. So what that might look like is I'd like to receive more information about working for this organization. So they go ahead and submit themselves into the contact relationship management system and they receive a series of emails about the benefits of working for your organization. From there, they might be directed back to your website at a later date. They've had some time to think about it. They, you know, are very interested. All of the benefits are becoming really apparent. They come back to your career's landing page and they see all of the jobs that are available. From there, they go ahead and they can actually apply. In this case, we sent them off the website to apply but in most cases, we'd love them to apply from your website. And then they receive an automated response and if all goes well and it goes through your system, that person is hired and you begin to onboard them as an employee. So that's what that user journey would look like in this specific scenario. The final user experience piece, and this is pulled out from the personas in the user journey a little bit but something that's so important to consider as we're continuing to look at these different audiences and different people that are gonna be viewing our site, we have to consider what device they're coming from. So while you're working at your desk throughout the day and you're developing your site, you might be doing that from your desktop or your laptop but it's really important to know that, you know, our target audiences aren't necessarily using the exact same devices that we're building our website from. So mobile optimization is increasingly important. Typically you're gonna see more than half of your website traffic come from a mobile device, whether it be a phone or a tablet. So it's very, very important that we consider mobile optimization as we're building our site. So from a design standpoint, from a performance standpoint, the way you're putting your content on your site, the type of content that you're putting on your site, you always wanna come back to, what does this look like on mobile and what does this mean for a mobile user? For many tools that you're gonna be using to develop your site, there is always an option to kind of toggle back and forth because this is such an important piece, you will find that that's really built into the development process for a lot of tools that are out there. So a lot of times you can build out a page, you can see what it looks like on desktop, you can adjust the screen size, see what it looks like on a tablet and see what it looks like on mobile and make adjustments accordingly. So back to that kind of CMS decision we talked about in the beginning and we talked about the update process, making sure that you have a tool at your disposal where you can preview on multiple devices. So you don't have to have a phone, a tablet, various size laptops on your desk to test out your site. Having that tool right there where you can just click back and forth and toggle would be really, really helpful in the process. So definitely always make sure you're considering how your site is gonna function on every type of device, not just mobile, not just your size desktop, you wanna make sure it's gonna work on every type of device. This is just an example here. The best practice as of right now for mobile optimization is to build what's called a responsive site. So when we first started having mobile friendly sites, you probably heard the term mobile friendly a lot when we refer to websites. There used to be the common practice to have a version of your site and then a mobile version of your site. A lot of times that required some redundancy and updates. It required a lack of features occasionally when you moved from one device to the other because the mobile format was so different. What we're able to do at this point is mobile responsive site. So that just means the site is designed in a way that as the window shrinks down, the site scales itself to fit the device that you are working from. So a larger desktop screen might look a little bit different from your smaller laptop screen, which is gonna look different from a tablet and look different from your smartphone. So a responsive site definitely is the way to go to ensure that you're gonna have the optimal experience on as many devices as possible. All right, thank you for going over that Melissa. I know streamlining the website, although it can seem like a huge undertaking is definitely a huge piece of special user journeys. Now that you understand kind of the importance of that, I would love to go over really the integration and automation opportunities. I think over on your website, your website is really the cornerstone for sharing and building your mission with your target audience. But it's still not, it's still just a piece of your overall technology stack. Sorry. And so we wanna make sure that we're incorporating those other pieces so that the user journey extends past the website and really has a start to end finish. That's nice and seamless. By integrating key technologies like a CRM or donation software and using them to automate internal or even client facing processes, you can really multiply the impact of your website. Melissa, why don't you review the most common types of integrations and automations we seem to encounter through the nonprofit scope so that people understand maybe best practices or what they should look at adding on their own websites. Yeah, definitely. This is one of my favorite pieces to talk about because I believe that setting up a new website, redesigning, redeveloping your site, it's a big task to take on and it's very important for the success of your organization. And I love the integration piece because I feel like this is where the hard work really shows itself because your website, when it's done properly and when it's integrated with the appropriate systems can really function as another team member for you. Between integrations and automations that you can put together with these systems, it can be like adding several team members to your staff when maybe you hadn't had that opportunity previously. And if your website can, the work that you put into building your website can in turn take off some of the burden on your resources or your workload, I think that's a really cool thing to see. So that's definitely one of the benefits of considering tying in some of your existing systems with your site so that some things can happen automatically rather than having to happen manually and have a person that's actually dedicated to doing those things. So when we look at a CRM system or a contact relationship management, this is gonna help us track individual contacts and how they're engaging with your organization. Depending on the system that you use, it's gonna track different data and it's gonna track different types of people. Something that we wanna look for for nonprofits is we wanna find that combination of how are we going to find a system that's going to track all of our different types of constituents and be customizable enough that we're able to capture data that's important for us to market and talk to all of those different types of constituents. So you might wanna look at something that allows you to customize for donors but also allows you to customize for maybe you have community partners, maybe you have program participants or prospective program participants. And you wanna make sure that your contact or relationship management tool allows you to account for all of those people. You wanna collect different data for all of those different types of contacts or personas. And so making sure that you have a tool that is flexible and can be set up for all of those different things is really important. I've seen a lot of times where maybe you try to take a donor tool and use it for volunteers or use it for program participants and customizations aren't available. So again, just like selecting your content management system for your site, selecting a CRM tool that is going to work well for all of the different types of data you're gonna track is gonna be really, really important. The other piece you wanna look at is how does this integrate with your website? And that's gonna be the same for the other systems we go through as well. A lot of times that's one of the main selling points. So when you're looking up, maybe you're looking up HubSpot, maybe you're looking at something like Salesforce. When you're looking at a CRM system, it's gonna talk about how it integrates with your website. So do you embed forms on your website? For WordPress, a common way to integrate is through a plugin or maybe there might be a way that some custom coding or an API connects the system with your site, which would require a little bit more advanced resources to put together. So it's really important to make sure you understand how does that system talk with your website? Is it compatible with your website to make sure that it's gonna work for you? An example of how a CRM system can work for you on your website would be creating website lead forms that are going to connect directly to your CRM system. So if we give the example of signing up for a newsletter, your newsletter might be issued from your CRM system and you might keep a list in your CRM of people who are subscribed to your newsletter by connecting the form on your website to your CRM system. That list is gonna update itself automatically. So no longer do you have to download your entries or receive emails of your entries and enter them in manually. If you're connected with your CRM, they're gonna be entered automatically. Same type of thing for prospective program participants. If someone's interested and they wanna learn more, maybe there's a form on your website that says learn more and select the program you're interested in learning more about. They fill out that form, they go into your CRM system and you can see that person and the right person can get notifications. You can run reports. There's a lot of information that you can see from a high level on how that person has been entered into your system and how you follow up with them. Marketing automation is gonna be directly related to that. A lot of CRM systems will have marketing automation as one of their features. So something that marketing automation is gonna allow us to do is use software from that contact system to automatically reach out to certain people based on triggers. So if I'm using program participants again as our example, maybe someone comes in and they say, I'm interested in participating in this program but I need to learn more. Well, they go ahead and they fill out the learn more form. In a traditional environment, you might have to get an email about that, contact the program leader. The program leader has to write a custom email. They have to reach out to the person and communicate back and forth. And it's a very, very manual process to get that person to engage with your organization. If that's not possible, then marketing automation steps in here and allows you to automate that process. Set the email up. When someone says they're interested in this program, send them that email automatically, no person required. We also wanna make sure we talk about donations and fundraising. You definitely wanna make sure if you're accepting donations that you have some sort of online tool to be able to do this from your website. Again, takes out a manual process. If someone does not have to call, write a check, mail in their donation, they can complete that donation right on your website, feel comfortable with it, know they're working with an organization they trust because it's right on your website, it's branded. That's gonna be a really important process. Thanks Melissa for going over that. I know we wanna jump into our methodology. I know we have been taking a little longer than we had expected. So I would like to go through this section a little bit quicker, just so we do have some time to get to people's questions. I know we had scheduled an hour for this. It looks like a breather is okay if we go over, but I'm sure some of you do not have time to go over as well. So why don't we try to go through this part really quick and then we can gotta get to the end, go over our offerings and get to some of the Q&A. Yes, sure. So our methodology, what we're gonna talk about here is growth, serve and design. And this is just the approach that TAP takes when we build our websites and when we work with our nonprofit clients. We've referenced this as we've gone through the best practices so far. When we're looking at traditional website design, when this is, this is where you put all of your resources into building a site and make no future plan, right? So we're gonna spend six months to a year putting together a site. It's gonna be difficult to plan that far out. It's gonna cost a lot. It's gonna take a lot of resources and a long timeline. And then you're not necessarily coming up with a plan for once your site launches. So that's the traditional approach to website design and I think what puts a lot of nonprofits in the place that they are today where they have a site that is great and looks nice but they haven't been able to update it in six months, a year, maybe sometimes two years because they went through this process and there was no consideration of what happens after the site launches. So a little bit of a different approach to how to build a site is growth driven design. And this is where we're really making the website design process cyclical. We're talking about creating a site and then revisiting it and updating it continually not just making a site and letting it sit. So that's really our kind of fundamental methodology when we're looking at how we're gonna approach a website project and what it's gonna look like longterm. It's also a great way to look at resources, budget and timeline because we're able to adjust based on what you see here. So the first piece is gonna be strategy. We wanna look at how are we gonna scale a site? How are we gonna make it flexible? Who are we trying to reach? What content management system? This is all the planning, right? So you still have to do your planning. You still need to come up with a strategy but the idea here is that you don't have to account for everything right now. You know your organization's gonna change. Your target audience might change a little bit. You're gonna learn as you go and knowing that you can change this eventually that's gonna make this process much quicker and much more effective. Note this is very much everything we went over right in the very beginning of the presentation because we ultimately wanna share our process with you. These two is gonna be your Launchpad website. And personally, I don't love that this is Launchpad. That's not my favorite terminology because I think that makes it sound like it's a placeholder website that it's not the final product. But the intention of this phase is that it's the first iteration of your website. So it's still high quality, has functionality, can be complex, can be custom but it's just that first iteration. It's the acknowledgement that this site is gonna teach us something and it is gonna grow and it is gonna scale as our organization changes. So this is when you would do your development. You'd consider user experience when design happens and when your initial integrations happen. So what systems already exist and how can we make those work with your website? And Kevin Mulhall, I saw you asked a question similar to this. So yes, this could also be designed around budget as well. So if we want to start small and slowly move as we grow, that is no problem as well. Definitely. And phase three, this is the most important part of growth-driven design and the differentiator from traditional website design is that phase three is continuous improvement. The idea that you learn from your site, it's a living and breathing thing. You're gonna have analytics, you're gonna have form submissions, you're going to have user feedback and it might be, in person, it might be people emailing you, it might be positive, it might be negative, but you are gonna get feedback on that site and see how users are actually interacting with your site. So even though we do the planning, we do personas, we come up with our target audiences, we put some research into our site architecture, you might find that all of those decisions made there weren't necessarily the final decisions, right? So there's an opportunity to make changes to that and that's what this phase is acknowledging, is that just because we put about us our main menu bar does not mean that anyone's gonna look at the about us page. If we see over time, no one visits that page, we need to adjust and we need to put the content that our users are actually looking for. So phase three, continuous improvement, the idea is that this goes on forever, it's cyclical and you can continue to strategize, make updates, deploy them, analyze them and then start over. And it's just knowing that this is a learning experience and it's gonna be different for each organization. So it's very important when you're looking at your budget, you're looking at your strategy and your approach that you build this part into your website. Thanks Melissa for kind of going over our methodology. I know you ultimately are the one that is in charge of managing this for all of our customers as they come through building websites. I guess as a next step, we do wanna briefly go over some of what we offer when we go full circle with we showed you the pillars of what creates a good website, how we design them from really the foundation up. And now we wanna show you kind of the ways we partner with TechSoup to offer you help in all different aspects depending on where your organization resides today. So we do have four main offerings here. Biggest thing to understand is that it's really not for offerings. The non-profit starter website and custom website, these are both full new website development based on budget and needs. While the website maintenance subscription is a way, I know I discussed another thing was Tom Shipman I answered a question to earlier about, about his WordPress website. This is a way we could get in if you need a higher help for at different levels, whether it's just helping you add content or if it's adding integrations. We also offer website maintenance packages to either help maintain your website or also add content if you like the existing site. The last one being hosting security that is more for on the WordPress end and I will review that when we get to it. So first one to start off with is the non-profit starter site. Big thing here is we design this after, really helping steward hundreds of nonprofits through this process. This is that basic launchpad website. And when I use the term basic, it's not necessarily that it is cheaper and expensive. It's that we wanna get you off, get you running, get donations in the door. We wanna get you creating that business and start to give you that growth potential. This is a way that you basically share the content and our team will create a easy site that your representatives, your constituents can get in and reasonably interact with. Starting at $3,500 for a Wix site. If we would wanna start move up the WordPress cause we think long-term we need a bigger foundation so the ability to add on more complex integrations. We can also start with WordPress and that would be at 4,500. There are a couple of different options that we can add on depending on your needs and we can discuss those if you wanna aim for wire. This is kind of what's included. There are five main web pages included. I guess I went over a lot of this already. I forgot this page was here. So, but yes, it's Wix or WordPress, everything you get, you do get a dedicated account manager and to Melissa's point, you get the homepage, the about us, the what you do, the blog so you can continually add content and then the contact page. A lot of people will add on maybe like an additional donations page or a couple additional pages as they go. From here, based on your individual needs, I mean, our custom website development option is a great option here. This starts with up to 25 pages so a lot more expansive than our standard offering. And the biggest thing to note is that it includes a lot more strategy up front. This is where our team will meet with you and talk about what your goals are and custom tailor a site to your specific goals. Melissa, you flip over to that next page. This kind of goes over everything Melissa talked about. A lot of times these sites typically range anywhere from about 12 to $14,000 when we talk about hitting everyone's specific needs incorporating a donations piece, et cetera. The last or second to last piece here is the website maintenance services. So this is the piece where we come in and we're able to think of this as hiring someone remote instead of having to hire a new team member to make adjustments to your website, something like that. We do offer different packages starting at $500 a month for you to hire us and basically have someone once a month to come in and make updates on your behalf. This can range anywhere from just general content updates all the way to doing complex integrations just depends on the level of service you would like to deploy. And sorry, going back to the website maintenance for a quick, I guess this is the packages right here. Big thing here is this is traditionally only for WordPress or Wix sites. If you have something outside of that, yes, please inquire and let us know. We just wanna make sure that we have the correct experts on staff to reasonably take on your goals. Last one really is security and hosting. So should you have a WordPress site unlike Wix that hosted themselves, you will need a place to host it. So TechSoup and ourselves we offer a hosting option is $99 a month. This is think of it as a way to do all your updates, your security, ensuring that your plugins stay up to date up to 300,000 monthly views and 40 gigabytes of storage typically more than sufficient for almost every nonprofit we talk to but there are sometimes needs where they're bigger than that we can't accommodate those as well just inquire and let us know. We like this because when we build a website if you wanna have one person to call one person to fix it this gives you that all in one solution where we are hosting and creating your website for you. As a next step, yeah, anyone who's interested if you need help whether it's fixing, creating, starting a new website we would love to talk, understand what your timeline is what your goals are and kind of really direct you towards the best path hopefully today has helped you kind of align yourself with what offerings we do offer and maybe if you're trying to do this yourself it's giving you goals or at least the methodology to reasonably take on this endeavor. It's not something easy it's something we learn every single day with every client that comes through the door so we're always trying to better ourselves as well most anything to add there. Go ahead and jump into some of the questions we've been answering some of them in the Q and A but there are a few that could kind of save to address out loud because I think that might be beneficial for the audience if anyone has any additional questions feel free to drop them in the chat and we'll try to get to as many as we can in this last 10 minutes. The first one we'll start with is from David is it better to integrate several tools or to buy an all in one all singing, all dancing system like Nation Builder or Action Network and that's a great question when it comes to integrations and something that I think a lot of nonprofits run into is how do I budget for these systems and how do I make sure that from a technology standpoint we can account for all of these systems. Our recommendation is to treat this very similar to how we're recommending treating your website is that we go back and we strategize exactly what's needed here and look at what we might need in the future. So starting with a list of requirements what do you need this system to do? Do you have a website you needed to work with? Do you have data you already collect that you need to continue collecting? What types of constituents do you have? What types of data or automations are you looking to create with that data? So really just coming up with a wish list of the ideal technology and what that would look like and removing specific systems from it. From there, go ahead and do your research and figure out, is there a system that already does all of this or do I need something custom or a combination of things? There are a ton of advantages to having a simplified tech stack and having a system that does everything all at once but a lot of times there can be a lot of limitations of kind of going all in with one system. So finding that happy medium, working with experts that work with those systems on an everyday basis is really important. Making sure you're working with people that have used the systems before maybe other people within your organization, other non-profits you partner with. Get an understanding of how people feel about certain systems and how it's worked for their organization. Also working with partners like us that have seen a lot of different systems at play. We can give you feedback on where the positive and negatives of using those systems usually are. So in a long-winded answer, the simple part of that would be to list out your requirements and then build your tech stack based on your requirements. Don't come up with your requirements based on a certain system. And Jason, are there any other, I'm kind of scrolling through some of the questions. I'm seeing if there any. There's still less questions in the Q&A. I've seen a couple of questions on dark mode, Melissa. Have you encountered the dark mode with websites and how really we're using that through Wix and WordPress? I would need to look a little bit more into that one. I saw those as well. Let's see. There was a question about accessibility tools. So you will find, depending on the system that you're using, Wix should have some accessibility tools to be able to review. You'll also find that a lot of times the accessibility requirements are going to overlap with search engine optimization features because screen readers are looking at a lot of the same stuff that search engines are looking at. So most tools that you're using for your website now should have some sort of search engine optimization piece built in that will require you to write meta descriptions to write alt tags for your images and things like that. Following those search engine guidelines is oftentimes, it's not a full way to guarantee accessibility, but it does get you on the right track. Search engines a lot of times are looking for the same things as page readers. For WordPress, there are a few plugins that you can put in place to manage your accessibility. I'm sure you've also seen some of the tools that pop up on the side of websites that you can open up a toolbar when you need extra accessibility tools. So that would be something to look at in your content management system selection is what tools are available natively or what tools are available from a third party that can integrate with my CMS to provide accessibility. There was a question early on that I believe we answered in the Q&A, but I think it might be good for the group is where would you put in your site architecture, where would you put announcements about the organization or news articles or media features? We love using a blog or for that piece. A lot of times we find that's how organizations end up utilizing their blog. Blogging is time consuming. It's something that you may not be able to do on a daily, weekly basis is put out original content, but news articles, media features, spotlights of supporters or participants are great ways to supplement your blog and keep that content fresh. So having a blog on your site, having that as a place where you can say, hey, look, we were on the news last night, here's the clip on YouTube that featured our organization or we were in the newspaper this morning, here's a link to that article. That's a great way to outsource content so that it's not a burden on your resources to actually create new content. You're just using what's existing. Also helps keep your site fresh so that when someone revisits, when we looked at that user journey, we want people to come back to our website and we don't want them to see the same thing every time. So if we have news updates, blog posts and we can keep that fresh, that's really beneficial for the user. Another question I saw, Susan Stillman, you had asked about saying your organization does not currently have a CRM and is there certain things you should keep in mind as you redesign your current website? We do have an offering that we just launched. Actually, we are a HubSpot partner and one of my colleagues could meet with you to discuss kind of the individual needs here. There are multiple CRMs we are familiar with and work with so not necessarily that HubSpot would be the best offering but if it is, yes, we could help you not only deploy it but also integrate it to your website. So I will have our team follow up with you on that host meeting. If there's anyone else that's interested in that as well. Yes, we are a full blown marketing agency as well. So we do a lot more than just websites. So if you need help creating strategy, doing content, I know there was a few questions that going around, how do you create site maps? For a lot of people sometimes it's just content strategy. So if you need to help doing content strategy we do offer audits as well where we could help you. Yeah, and something to think about as you're planning out your site if you're not quite ready to make a decision on a CRM system but you still wanna move forward with your website, just think about the type of data you wanna collect. So you can start to collect that data in a manual way and then eventually connect it to a CRM system. So you can still have forms on your website. You can still accept donations. You can do all of that. Just think about the type of data you wanna collect and start collecting it on your site. Even if it means it just emails you when someone submits the form. Eventually you can connect that to a much larger process, which would be nice. Another question I saw from Darcy, is there a CMS that's most compatible for a non-profit also using ticketing software functions? So there could be a lot of different requirements that might lend themselves to how you wanna pick your ticketing system. Typically we do use a WordPress plugin called the Events Calendar that we use for event promotion and ticketing. It has a lot of, we love this because it is a very scalable product. It works really well with other ticketing and event systems. It also has a ton of features. So if there are things you need like mobile ticketing or like recurring membership ticketing offerings, maybe your members get a discount on tickets or they get first access to tickets. There are customizations available there. So that's a tool we definitely recommend. I know Wix has a tool for that as well. Again here, just like when you're considering a CRM system, just like when you're building your site, pull together a list of requirements and then research systems or work with someone to research systems based on that. And that's gonna be the best way to find the solution that's gonna work for you. It might be a combination of a few things or there might be one dream system out there that works well for everything you wanna do. I saw Illinois Conference United Church also reached out asking if HubSpot integrates well with WordPress and the answer is yes. If you want to share your information other than just that name, I can make sure that my team reaches out to you as well. And there's another question from Sandra about do you provide a member only section as part of your site development? And yes, that is a very common ask when we work with nonprofits that looks very different for all organizations. We find that there are a lot of different pieces and requirements there. Something to consider if that needs to be part of your site, if members are a part of your site is to really look at what type of access are you looking to provide them? How do you want them to log in? Do you need them to manage and pay for their membership online? And also just what are the benefits of being a member and how can you use your website to really show the advantages there? And it does look like, sorry. I saw JoLeen reach out saying is there a cost for a consult? No, there is not. The only cost is my time and the issue is that we have about 300 and 400 people on this call. So booking time is going to be tight in the next three weeks, four weeks. Just going to throw that out there for everyone, but no, the cost for consultation is free. All I ask is that given today, we kind of did share some ideas on pricing. Let's just make sure we're within an ideal budget and timeline and we would love to help you in whatever capacity you're looking for. And if we can't reasonably help you, we will be sure to tell you that as well and try to point you to the correct team. Because I know TechSoup does partner with a couple other organizations that can help in other facets. And we have no problem throwing you to them if that's the correct place. Thank you. So I know we're up against our time now and I apologize that we didn't get to all of the questions, but you do have us at your disposal. Please definitely reach out, book a consultation, meet with our team. We're happy to continue to address your questions and address your questions in the context of your organization so that we can hopefully help you move forward and help you have a successful site.