 and there until the very end I really appreciate it. My name's Laura Dapkus and I'm here to speak about WordPress for nonprofit organizations and we're also going to talk about things that impact you know if you work on campaigns, any advocacy group, faith communities, even local government, those are my favorite areas to work in. I also do small business sites but my very favorite is nonprofits. I am located north of Dallas in a rural community. I'm originally from Los Angeles. I'm an actual shepherd that's why the business is called Sheet Boutique and what I discovered in living in these communities we have a lot of rural poverty. We also happen to have a labor shortage which doesn't really make us a lot of sense and that's why my passion is education particularly community colleges and so what you're doing as a web first of all how many of you actually work for a nonprofit or educational institution and versus how many of you are designing for clients nonprofit clients or want to or as a volunteer both yeah yeah me too. As a nonprofit person you are really asking somebody to trust you. You're asking somebody to give you something and not expect anything in return whether that be money. You want to really show yourselves as being a good steward of your donor's money. You also want to show yourself as being a worthy place to volunteer. I think a lot of us have probably shown up at for to volunteer somewhere and it was a hot mess and it wasn't worth our time. You don't want to convey that with your website. So that's why for me you know as a professional my clients are going to get something that's accessible it'll have it'll be consistent it'll have transparency in terms of what we do what the organization does who's in charge how we spend your money and it'll be hosted in a secure reliable fast and air free environment and in terms of being timely that's your content creators job and that can be kind of a challenge when a lot of people are volunteers or your spread really thin. We're going to talk a little bit about content as well. Most nonprofits don't realize they have a problem until their website breaks they get hacked they lose control of their entire domain name forever or their web designer disappears. So I get a lot of people they have too many eggs in the volunteer basket and they're so and so made a website for us and they disappear. One of our board members kids made the website and now we can't get in anymore it doesn't work anymore. So this is where it actually behooves a non-profit no matter how small to have a professional. So you may ask yourself well should we have somebody who's in the organization do the website for us like a board member or you know a volunteer or something like that and you know there's pros and cons to that. There are advantages to having someone from the outside do your site because you can fire them. You don't have to worry about hurting people's feelings. I as your designer don't have to worry about hurting y'all's feelings because you know sometimes we as designers or developers have to tell clients something they don't want to hear. That can be really hard coming from someone within the organization. It can also be really hard to hurt the feelings of a donor or a board member or somebody that's really important valued and has been with the organization a long time and is loved because sometimes you know they may have a suggestion that's really not practical or not appropriate. You'd rather have you know a professional from the outside tell say that bad news than have conflict and drama in the organization. But it's really hard to take money away from your primary mission you know whether it be a food pantry or a campaign or something like that and spend money on you know a consultant or an outside company and that's why you should do a needs assessment and figure out how much can we spend what is the bank for the buck that we're going to get and needs assessment can be another hour and a half to our presentation so I'm gonna go over that pretty quick but what what you're mainly asking to do is what supporter participation are you trying to engender from this site. Who are your audience who what features you need over what time frame that is going to depend on what you're asking people to do. So I have some chamber of commerce sites and they have very complicated calendars they have a lot of forms they take memberships they take sponsorships they have a lot of events that's a lot different than you know a food pantry and they're really just trying to get donations of food and they don't they have one event a month or two events and it's a regular interval they don't need a big complicated calendar. Ask yourself what other audiences so I'm primarily talking about donors here because that's going to bring money into your site but some nonprofit websites are trying to reach potential beneficiaries potential clients people that need their services some are in advocacy so they are really trying to approach the government they want government agencies or perhaps legislators to read what they have to say or hear what they have to say and interact with them and also if you apply for grants having a really detailed professional looking website that makes it look like you deserve the grant that can be a huge plus as well. What I try to do with nonprofits is try to be realistic about what features they need now so the wonderful thing about WordPress is that it's so expandable you can do anything from something really simple to something really complicated so what do you what are you targeting now versus 10 years from now are you trying to grow an endowment that's going to be a different sell later on that's going to be something that's more personal and a different you know are you looking for the $50,000 $100,000 million person 10 years from now or two years from now or now like what are you looking for are you trying to get a lot of small donations are you trying to sell merchandise where is that going to go so if you're a nonprofit has strategic planning documents it's a really good idea to get those out and review them and if they don't have one maybe you know before you put a lot of effort into marketing think about what where the nonprofit really is and if they're ready for like to spend money on a good quality WordPress site also be realistic about resources available to manage your content so your client may want a forum for example so who's going to monitor the forum who's going to kick people off the forum if that needs to happen and make uncomfortable decisions I love how WordPress can give you different levels of access and publishing ability so I think it would be great to have board members and volunteers publish content so who's going to train him who's going to give them approval publishing rights and learn what all those levels are and what those people are allowed to do whether they be editors or contributors so the purpose again of your website is to make it easy for people to give you money make it easy for that person interested in your nonprofit to make take that first step whether it be volunteering giving donations selling memberships I mentioned chambers of commerce selling tickets selling merchandise I've come into situations where somebody had a website that did not take donations effectively or well or they didn't take them at all as soon as we redesigned the site got that in just the money just comes in it's just amazing that way and it's super cool and pretty soon you've more than paid for your development cost and what you've taken in and also don't forget efficient use of staff time if you do have a paid staff because maybe your website can automate some of these things that your staff was doing by hand maybe like I like to when I do a needs assessment I do a questionnaire as well and I also have the staff if they're a busy you know office keep track of what kind of calls they get just make kind of a log and then you know hopefully you can put things on the website that will not have people call the staff asking for routine questions so again you can save money with using your website efficiently so if there's one thing that you remember from today it would be decision-making for nonprofits is not the unfiltered wants of 12 people so if you're used to dealing with businesses this can be really a different going into a nonprofit or type arrangement because maybe you're used to the boss makes all the decisions and you negotiate with the boss about what the website's going to say do and look like and you and the boss agree everything's cool well you you cannot answer to a nonprofit board or city council you know eight to twelve people or whatever it is that's not going to work so what you need to do is identify in that organization who is empowered to make decisions working with you who is empowered to take all those inputs even that no matter how big the donor is or how important this person is you know filter them down make have judgments negotiate with you talk about the pros and cons and implement it the best possible solution and I put that person's name in the contract because if they leave we renegotiate the contract because you know the new person are they gonna like anything the old person did no you're gonna get to start over so in order and you know I do that now because it's happened right that's that's how a lot of contracts get changed so you want to keep that consistent voice going through the entire project and if the voice ends up changing you have to you know start go back take a step back another project management thing is ask if there are 501c3 organization and that's a federally IRS tax exempt organization so not everybody does that right away because it's a lot of paperwork and it's expensive but the thing about that is you don't listen Texas you don't charge sales tax I'm guessing here you don't oh it's different yeah you all have different sales tax than we do but we don't charge sales tax and also they may be eligible for some discounts from a merchant processing from PayPal and Stripe if they're 501c3 so that can be really helpful and from some other services and also keep really good records our media market's really small where we live so we find out about all the embezzlement that happens with nonprofits and it's really shocking so don't be an unwitting participant in some kind of shady embezzlement like if some paperwork's not kept upright so assume that there will be you know embezzlement and act accordingly just be super careful copy lots of people on everything keep a really good paper trail it's surprising that how often this happens I'm really glad to see a lot of talk at this word camp about the issues of accessibility and inclusivity I don't think I've ever been on a word camp where this was talked about this much and that makes me really happy because I feel like as nonprofits or education or government agencies we have to be on the forefront of that and be good examples for everybody else so definitely I won't everybody has shared so many great ideas and since we're limited on time I'm not going to rehash any of that and I'm not an expert on it my main thing that I try to do is there's several technical things that I won't get into but I look at contrast you know because we're all going to get older we're all going to lose contrast it type versus the background and the other thing is I want to make sure people don't need a mouse to navigate and that we don't have jumpy navigation menus and stuff like that because a lot of people have arthritis or MS or something like that and can't use a mouse so those are two things I always test for and color blindness and things of that nature storytelling is going to be a lot more fun with a nonprofit than maybe most business sites so that's one of the reasons why I love it use pictures and and stories about the beneficiaries if the privacy allows a lot of time it does not allow you to do that you don't want to do that so you can use stock pictures it's not my favorite thing to use stock pictures obviously they get used a lot but if you an alternative is to show volunteers and donors having fun it encourages people to kind of jump on the bandwagon everybody wants to be part of a successful organization so the more you can show like people getting involved in the community to support you that encourages more donations to come in also don't forget to really treat your donors well donor prestige is important donors get asked especially your corporate donors and your big high-profile people and organizations in the community get asked for a lot of donations a lot so give them some value for their donation they are doing out the goodness of their heart but I think they also need to get recognition out of it so think about different levels maybe of sponsorship what they get they get links back to their site they get their logo on there just think about I'm on the board of a community college foundation and they do such a great job recognizing people I've been I've been involved with some that don't so it's very very important I mean you notice the beautiful mosaic when we walked in that recognized all the donors for this building right so what's your gonna what's gonna be your kind of mosaic in the front of the building social media is WordPress adjacent so I'll just say that a lot of my clients are much more comfortable using Facebook than anything else just in it might be just be our region and the demographics that I work with so we would prefer that people post on your website and then share that on social media it's better for SEO but if they're really just more comfortable with Facebook you can or Instagram or Twitter you can display these feeds using a plug-in I've got some plugins at the end that I'll show you and that you can download the slides and I'll give you that address Facebook has fundraising tools if you're a US based 501c3 there's some pluses and minuses to that the main minus is you don't own it you don't own your data so but it's a simple way to get started some people might not have the resources to do some you know credit card processing or something complicated on their own site so it's just out there you can consider that or not if you're especially if you're involved in a real sensitive area I would suggest using social media and email archiving services it keeps track of everything people have done protect your accounts give the minimum access needed both for WordPress and for Facebook sometimes people hand over admin to people and they lose their site completely their Facebook I've seen this happen with nonprofits and businesses don't do that and finally have a crisis communications plan in case of a natural disaster like if you're a church or a rescue people are gonna need your services how are they gonna access how are you gonna access your media in order to communicate that also there's something called guide star does anyone use guide star so that's another it's kind of like Yelp for nonprofits suggest you check it out you don't have to be a 501c3 to use it some grants require that you're in it it's also for transparency and rating these are some of the resources available of course there's so many different ways to do it but I won't go over these in great details it really depends on what you're doing if you need a calendar or not but for search so some of you may have large libraries of information and WordPress search is not really good it doesn't search PDFs so I use site search 360 for my more detailed sites it's really wonderful or search WP because Google site search puts ads on there now so there's ways to get around it with a nonprofit but knew who wants to deal with Google not me and they won't do it for government the only different on profit if you have a lot of authors for your WordPress site which I really encourage that you do because it helps with your storytelling helps us share the message I have some tools on there that help you lock things down a little bit more than WordPress does right out of the box also I use I encourage people to use Grammarly which is a browser extension it's not a WordPress plugin it will help them correct their grammar and they'll feel more comfortable writing so we have that is about it we may have one minute or two minutes left so does anyone have questions for me I would love to hear them I've ten minutes left I talk that fast for no reason all right questions hi so what what's your recommended that's a great question so most for most nonprofits when they're if they're small and they're getting started I you know PayPal is real is good out of the box you know just out of the box I use gravity forms with PayPal and people can pay with a credit card if they don't have a PayPal account but PayPal is always changing that interface to get to to skip the login and get to pay but it's so weird every time it just keeps looking different if they have resources I use Stripe so they can just take straight-up credit cards and especially if you have corporate donors like they feel more comfortable with just a regular transparent credit card processing so they don't leave the site it's just like a normal e-commerce processing the downside to that is you know anytime you take any credit card from your accounting perspective it's another bank account so it's another thing somebody has to keep track of in QuickBooks or whatever yes so like if you just use gravity form play PayPal plug-in you're just paying for PayPal only and no plus plus extra and same with Stripe so Stripe just charges you the normal merchant processing fee and no extra on top of that and then they have a discount I don't know if I wrote it on there but oh yeah I did on the previous slide so if you are a 501c3 PayPal and Stripe have nonprofit rates so be sure you check their website out or ask them about that so it'll be cheaper oh yeah sorry and someone raise their hand behind yes oh right so your question is you have you have other members who want you to update content like I add this name add this change us put this picture on type questions I would have a are you an Albuquerque I will join the Albuquerque meet-up and have bring some volunteers with you who will help you post content because like I said they can post content without breaking the site because if you give them a low enough you know capability and you can even approve what they post so you can set it toward they're not like going crazy and posting whatever you have to approve it so but if you have some consistent pages that you don't want people editing like you might lock those down yourself but as a as a designer I encourage people to have a change request process you know but since you're a volunteer that's a little you know sticky but yeah like change process like a change management process and find out why are they so why they're asking for changes like you know what I mean did you guys have a big strategy shift where so that happens with organizations and businesses like sudden they have a strategy shift and now the content that you have is not appropriate and they're trying to change it and dribs and drabs and little bitty pieces when maybe what you really need to do is reevaluate the direction the tone whatever it happens it's okay I tell people you're not a failure if you're redesigning every two years I mean I think you're growing and you're changing other questions yes yeah I think so that oh sorry yes the the slides the slides are going to be at she I'm gonna put it on Twitter but it's I believe a sheet boutique comm slash word camp but I'll put it on Twitter also but there are you on there thank you for that oh I thought I did put on the last line I guess I did it my bad or I didn't get to the last slide and okay there you go yes thank you yes yes oh yes absolutely where there's no websites and it's just Facebook you know and that that's a really big good question and because we have had I mean blogging has given way to short form Internet and so I think for a lot of nonprofits just because we have so much transparency requirement and so much credibility that we have to build I think it's hard to do that on Facebook because you can't have like a library of static information that's always at the top very easily and then I mean there's a lot of nonprofits that need to have resource libraries with lots of information so you can't do that on that's impossible to do on Facebook like say it's a disease and you want to show you have to have a library of information about that illness or whatever but yeah I actually have some nonprofits who like they do start out with Facebook and they don't have a website for a while or if ever or I have them do Squarespace or WordPress.com something really simple because they can't afford the maintenance and the hosting you know we'd rather they do WordPress but if they can't afford it they can't afford it so I'd rather have them do something nice that's scaled down that's something crazy and not that doesn't serve their donors or their clients. Did you have another question? No? Yes? Do you have a favorite advertisement plugin? Oh yeah there's a logo rotator that I cannot remember what it is called. Oh an ad rotator? I don't have I don't use an ad rotator I there's one called logo there's a logo rotator one that I use for logos yeah but I can't remember what it's called because there's several there's several and it's not a slideshow plugin it's it's a simpler just for logos yeah it's a logo carousel that's it that's the one yes just for space purposes like if you have a lot and people clients ask for it so there's a lot of different ways to do it that's a thing you know that might not be your style you don't have to do it that way yeah sponsors sponsor logos yeah because a nice yeah yeah like thank you to the banquet sponsors you know then it rolls around yeah not your logo I mean yeah you want that to be at the top are there any other questions yes oh that's an awesome question how do you recommend switching from another platform to WordPress so well the first of all the way I convinced them to switch is you know WordPress powers what 28% of web now five minutes and so the chances of you finding a volunteer that already knows how to use WordPress or an employee that already knows how to use it is pretty good because people I've had you know employees that you know had their own hobby blog so they already knew how to use it which is awesome and also you know since it's open source and portable if you don't like me you can fire me and get somebody else if I don't like the hosting I can put it on someone else's hosting but then actual switch so I had a big city municipal website and I actually had a developer do a scrape and then they had a lot of PDF files so they and I don't know how to do this but developers do he scraped it and that automated a lot of it but I still had to get a lot of it manually cleaned up and there I feel I saw this question come up on advanced WordPress Facebook group the other day actually the whole transition and sometimes I just if it's small I just copy and paste because half the time you need to read that stuff anyway because it's gonna be out of date or there's gonna be typos or I'm a grammar nut and I have my grammar Lee in there and I run it all through Grammarly and I fix stuff so there's nothing to be ashamed of if you're copying and pasting but if there's hundreds of pages you might not be able to do that that's a great question yeah right if you if you've been I've been dealing with WordPress for over 10 years so to me I can do it in my sleep and then when you encounter something weird like oh no you know so yeah try to get him a switch I mean WordPress has longevity so I think it's a good investment for a nonprofit you know are there any other questions okay thank you for coming and sticking through to the end