 Welcome and thanks for joining us. We are thrilled to have you here for another episode of the nonprofit show. Today we're talking with Spencer Brooks and Spencer's here to talk to us about winning the website war. Before we dive into this conversation, Spencer, we of course want to make sure that our viewers and our listeners know who they're possibly looking at or listening to. Julia Patrick is out of the office as you can see today, but she will be back. She's the CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy, and enjoying some much needed time away. So enjoy that Julia. I'm Jarrett Ransom, glad to be here as her co-host and to continue to be of service in this capacity. I'm also known as the non-profit nerd, so I really like to get nerdy with these conversations, but also CEO of the Raven Group. We are honored to have the continued support investment of our presenting sponsors. I want to give a shout out to Bloomerang, American Nonprofit Academy, Fundraising Academy with the National University, non-profit nerd, your part-time controller, staffing boutique, and the non-profit thought leader. Please check out these companies. If you haven't done so yet, make sure that you do that. These companies, they're fantastic. The customer service is fantastic. They lean into you, your mission and your community. So please do check them out because they're here to help and support you. Hey, if you missed any of our episodes, you can find us on many platforms, including Roku, YouTube, Fire TV, as well as Vimeo. If you're a podcast listener like I am, and Spencer, I'm curious, do you listen to podcasts? I love podcasts. Yeah, I hope you do because I just learned that you're a podcast host as well, so I can't wait to learn more about that. You can also queue up the non-profit show wherever you stream your podcast, and I hope that Spencer will tell us about his as well. Speaking of Spencer, here he is, Spencer Brooks, founder and principal with Brooks Digital. Welcome, my friend. Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Garrett. Yeah. I run a digital agency called Brooks Digital, as you mentioned, and we really focus exclusively on websites for non-profits. So I just felt like it was a great fit when you reached out and, or maybe it was Julia, I can't remember now, but yeah, so a lot of what we do, like I mentioned, is website work focused on non-profits, and I think one of the things that we really focus on that's probably different than most other companies is just taking care of the website and the non-profit after it's built for the long-term. I think a lot of companies just focus on building the thing and then getting on with the next project, but we're really, yeah, I think it's really important to have a long-term relationship, and so that's what we really focus on, and as you mentioned, I also have a podcast, it's called Health Nonprofit Digital Marketing, and it talks about the specifics of digital marketing and web stuff for non-profits who happen to be in that health and wellness space. That is fantastic. You know, I really do believe that websites are so pivotal to our community, to our sector, obviously, and so having you here to share your valuable time and your expertise, Spencer, is so very needed. So thank you for that, and I'm gonna queue up your podcast as well, because I would love to listen. We always need more help and tips there. Well, hey, let's dive into winning the website war. We're gonna start off with this concept of website organization and usability, and I have to be honest, I didn't even know how to spell usability, so it's clear I don't quite know what that is. Dive deep with us here and shine some light. Sure. So usability is just really how easy a website or really any other digital tool for that matter is to use. So, you know, for example, when it comes to, we'll choose donation pages, right? If you go to a non-profits giving page and it has 17 steps and 100 fields, that is not very usable. It's not easy to use. If you go to Amazon and you have that one click by now, that's very easy to use. It's dangerous. It is. It is. And actually, you know, it's funny because I always say, and I don't really say this, I stole this from someone else and adapted it, so I have to give credit where credit is due, but if it's easier for someone to impulse buy a $20 doodad on Amazon, then it is to impulse give $20 to your organization, then you're going to fight an uphill battle because making a purchase on Amazon or some of these other commerce platforms is much more usable and user-friendly and easy to do than it is to go and browse a website or give. So that's what I'm kind of talking about when I say usability. Yeah, you're so right. I was having a conversation yesterday with a direct mail company and they were looking at the website of this client of mine and they said, you have these graphics that fly into your page for your donation page. What are your thoughts there? Like how simple should we keep our donation page? As simple as absolutely possible. Yeah, I mean, your donation page really only has one goal and that's to capture the gift. And so if you have stuff flying in from the left and the right, if that's distracting someone, if they're typing in their credit card information, you really have to consider if this graphic is flying in, they're going to stop entering that card information and go and look at what it is that has popped up on the screen and maybe you'll distract them. So I'm a huge advocate of making it as simple as possible, get rid of navigation, get rid of anything really outside of a logo and just make it as dead simple as you possibly can to allow someone to accomplish that task. Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head because when we can impulse buy, I'm going to say an umbrella because in our green room chatter we talked about in the Pacific Northwest, you don't carry an umbrella. So that might be my impulse buy here in Arizona if I see the weather forecast, but that buy now, donate now, it's instant, it's done. I love that Spencer. And I do think that we need more of that. You know, when it comes to the website organization, we've talked a little bit about the donation page. What other tips do you have for us to better utilize that organization of our website? Yeah, I find that common problems that nonprofits have when it comes to organizing their website, like here's a few indicators, maybe red flags that you can watch out for. If you're getting lost on your own site, trying to find something, that's a red flag. If you have your visitors calling you to accomplish tasks that they could accomplish on the website that are possible, that's also a red flag, right? And those things signify that maybe your website isn't organized as well as it should be, because really a website is a vehicle through which people accomplish various tasks. They come to do something, whether that goal is learning, giving, signing up for things, programs, for example. And so if your website is organized well, then that process is seamless. If it's organized poorly, then there's a lot of friction. And generally, because a website is tied to some pretty important outcomes, again, like giving, signing up for programs, volunteering, newsletter subscriptions, things like that. It's generally in your best interest to have your website organized well. And so those are some red flags that you can watch out for. That might indicate that there is a problem with your site. And then you can take steps to address that. Yeah, I love that because it truly could be the organization and usability could be, if you're getting calls for something that someone can do online, that is something to pay attention to. How do we're gonna move into the web platforms for nonprofits? How do nonprofit websites differ than any other businesses, right? Like what are the differentiators here? Yeah, I think the unlike a traditional business website, which has been a while since I built one of those, but a traditional business website is generally going to be fairly singularly focused on getting someone to buy something. And whereas a nonprofit's website is probably going to have a variety of different asks, it's not just going to be donate, although that's a big one, but depending on the particular person, again, they could be signing up for programs, they could be trying to get more information, they could be attending an event, things like that, volunteering. And those are also generally, they can be multiple different audiences. And so with a nonprofit's website, it's very interesting because there tends to be a wider variety of people that are going to visit it and also more tasks that they can accomplish on the website. And so it tends to be a little bit more complex sometimes in that regard. And then you pair that with the fact that there's generally more limited resources on the nonprofits and not just financially, but when it comes to people, you have the accidental techie that is, someone saw that you are good at spreadsheets and all of a sudden you're stuck maintaining the website. And that happens all the time. And then you put those things together and you actually have kind of this complex system to manage. So that's what comes to mind, at least off the top of my head. No, that's fantastic. Is there a magic range of numbers or pages that we're seeking? The short and not very satisfying answer is that it could be between five and five, 50,000. Depending on... I thought you were... I'm to give you the total on it. I mean, it's a little cheeky, right? But I think it begs the question of the pages are just a function of what the website does. So for example, I'll go on the really low end. If you're a grassroots organization and the website is not playing a big part in what you do, you basically need to have a proof that you exist somewhere if a major donor needs to vet you or for a grant or something like that, then you might just have five pages on your site. Conversely, if you are a national nonprofit or for example, we have a client that is really focused on diabetes, right? That's their issue space. And they're not this huge enterprise level nonprofit, but what they do is they publish a ton of weekly content that helps people with diabetes manage their condition. And they have thousands and thousands of different articles and blog posts on their site. And so it really, it honestly ranges. And so, but to try to sum up the answer in something that's a little bit simpler, I would say as few pages as possible for people to accomplish what they need to accomplish on your site. More is not necessarily better, but more is sometimes necessary. Sure. And I had heard someone say, you should look at every page and say, what is the purpose of this page? Do you guide that same principle with your clients? Yeah, I think that's exactly right. Is oftentimes you'll get a situation where either pages are redundant or on the other hand, they're trying to accomplish multiple things. And so I find it's very helpful to do, and we'll do this with clients. It's actually just literally create an inventory of all the pages on your site. It can be a spreadsheet, right? Home page and about page and all these things and actually go and look at all of them. And nine times out of 10, you'll find that some of them need to be updated. Oftentimes you'll archive pages, you'll combine them and just actually seeing everything on one big page is very helpful because then you can decide what's this page actually supposed to be about. But oftentimes what will happen is websites evolve over time and so things can get a little out of control. Well, that takes us to our next topic or discussion point is the metric side of it. How do we understand, as we look at the pages, I love the spreadsheet idea, how do we measure the website? What does that look like? There's a ton of data out there. If you've opened up, Google Analytics is the big platform, right? So if you go in there, most nonprofits sort of do the data cruise, what I like to call it, right? You just kind of cruise through the reports and you're like, that's an interesting number. I guess I could show that to the executive director or the board. But I think if there's one recommendation that I could give just to take your analytics level from the average to we're actually getting something out of this is to establish goals. And when I say goals, I don't just mean like sitting down and writing out, here's what we want the website to do. But then actually there's a feature in Google Analytics called goals. And that allows you to track key outcomes that you want from your site. And you can actually measure how many people gave and we were just talking about the phones, weren't we? Right before this. That's so great. That's awesome. So with Google Analytics, you can set up goals to track key outcomes because I think the purpose of every website is to accomplish certain outcomes. It doesn't really matter how many people visited your site if no one gave or signed up for your programs or things like that. So there's lots of articles on how to do this, but nonprofits who have defined goals for their websites which are specific tasks that visitors accomplish on their site. And then they track those have something to work with because they can see whether they're improving and find sticking points and things like that. Well, Sue, you brought up a comment that I want us to drive in or you drive a little further, honestly, is what do we share with the board, right? You said maybe this is the key metric that we share with the board or the executive director. Like are there any, if we could have a dashboard of metrics, what would that dashboard include? Yeah. So the board wants to know about big vanity numbers. And when I say big vanity numbers, I mean, you're generally the number of people that have visited your website in a year, like the size of your email list the number of people who have signed up, things like that. I find there is a tension between tracking the stuff that really matters. Like, again, visitors only matter in as much as they help you accomplish the actual goals. But sometimes the board wants to know about the big numbers because that's going to help prove impact in a way that people understand. It's going to help them raise more money as funders are asking about these metrics. And so I find that there's a little bit of a tension there where the board wants to know the vanity stuff and that's important. But if you actually want to drive meaningful progress on your site then you actually have to track, okay, the so what numbers, right? It's like, okay, you have visitors so what? So that means, are they giving more? Okay, that's what we need to be tracking. Are they signing up for our programs? We need to be tracking that. And then if you're tracking those numbers then you can actually start to dig into how can we make that experience better on the site? So I think that's a little bit of both, right? There's a give and take with the vanity numbers and then what I think the numbers that actually drive progress are. And those can be two different things sometimes. I like that vanity numbers and the so what numbers. We can put that on a dashboard. I am all over that Spencer. So thank you for sharing. Now there's so many widgets and gadgets and things that we can sync these days. How do we best integrate these outside tools with our nonprofit website? So yeah, this is a key question. As I mentioned before there's usually the access techie, right? That gets stuck with a bunch of different tools. I find that what happens over time is that there can be kind of this Frankenstein tech setup that can happen. I'll give you an example, right? So maybe you have events on your site like an event registration. And one day you realize, hey, we're hosting this fundraising event and we wanna charge a $20 admission fee. We can't do that on the website but it's in two weeks. So you go over to Eventbrite and you set up a page over there and you collect the information but all of a sudden you have two places that you need to update. You update the information in this one place and this other place and then all of a sudden the donor information that gets captured in Eventbrite is not synced to your CRM and then basically this poor accidental techie is like exporting spreadsheets and moving information around and it just happens like that. And so I think that when it comes to integrating outside tools with your website ideally the best case scenario is that you reduce and eliminate tools as much as possible. That's not always practical but I think the fewer tools that you can use the better because again, like if you eliminate the need for an integration it's always easier and sometimes the need happens just because it's more of a reactive solution to a problem. I think if you can't eliminate or consolidate your tools that trying to select tools that have built-in integrations that are maintained by the vendor is a very helpful strategy because a vendor is going to do a much better job at maintaining and making sure that integration just works out of the box than if you're responsible for setting that up in some way. And so you'll find like if you do your due diligence upfront when you're selecting tools and you say, I see that this particular vendor has a fairly mature integration ecosystem and they integrate with all these other tools that's a good bet to go with. And then if you really can't do that I would say the last step is to try to manually jig up something yourself. And I say that because it seems like a great idea but then something is going to break eventually and you're not going to realize it until two weeks have gone by and that there's going to be a crisis. And these things tend to break. Like you said, it's all been stung together it's just really been pulled in all these directions. I'm curious as we talk to you and I'm going to say this is certainly your zone of genius, Spencer, are there any integrations that you recommend? Are there some that just come top of mind that you're like I have seen these integrations work time and time again with my clients and I've had a really good experience. Yeah, I think the integrations and things that have worked well. I mean, this is a very common thing. And so it's almost not worth mentioning but I will anyway is that generally with fundraising tools, that's probably one of the biggest ones is as long as you're able to either embed a donation form on your site that is going to send information to your CRM, that's huge. If you're a fairly established nonprofit that's probably a given but I know some smaller organizations that we've worked with in the past will get tempted by something like PayPal, for example where they say, oh PayPal, their processing fees are the lowest we're going to get the most money out of it. And then all of a sudden they realize where I don't really have any way to collect this information about who's giving I can't tie any of this to campaigns and do things like that. And so, but if you're a fairly mature mid-sized nonprofit, that's probably not an issue. The other thing, there's two tools that I would recommend that tend to be good to actually facilitate integrations between other tools. You probably heard, or some people may have heard of, Zapier is one popular tool. There are better ones out there. One of them is called UNITO. I think Integromat is another one and these things are generally, they pick certain tools and they do a really good job of facilitating integrations between them both. So if you have, if you sign up for those tools you can set up integrations and they are much more robust and they tend not to break over time. So those things I've seen them personally work really well. You have to be using a tool that's within their ecosystem but if it's within their ecosystem, it really works well. Yeah, now that's great to hear. And I would say, yes, that donor platform is probably the most integration that I see and also I'm advocating for. What do you recommend by way of true website platforms? Like there was a time WordPress was all the craze and now there's others that have come up. There's Wix, there's maybe a square space, play something. Like there's so many out there. Are there any that really rise to the top that you recommend? Yeah, I'll try to distill this. I could do an entire show just about this topic to be honest. I'll distill this down into I think probably two key points. The first is getting on the right class of website platform and by that I mean there are website builders such as Squarespace or Wix and then there are content management systems like WordPress or Drupal or things like that. And it's important to choose the right class. Again, if you're a smaller nonprofit, if you have a simple site, a website builder is probably appropriate. Once you get to a certain point, it starts to be really limiting so you would move up to a true content management system such as WordPress or Drupal. That's mostly, that's what we build. There are other solutions. I know like BlackBot has their website builders and I can't really comment on those because that's not my particular area of expertise. Once you get on the right class of website platform then the second thing is if you are trying to choose between something like WordPress or Drupal, what matters more is how well those tools are customized, not so much whether which platform you choose. And that might be a little controversial but I think people get hung up on, it's gotta be WordPress or it's gotta be Drupal. I think in reality you can have a WordPress website that's badly customized and it's gonna be a horrible experience and you had to have a much better experience if you chose Drupal and it was customized well. Even if maybe WordPress on paper looks a little bit better for your organization. I think it matters exponentially more how well it's been customized than the differences between the platforms which tend to be more minimal by comparison. And I complete, I appreciate your your recognition. That's not a word but recognizing the fact again of truly going with the right class of a platform that you might not need all the bells and whistles for a grassroots organization and the like. My final question before sadly our time's coming up is how often should we be updating our website? Okay, this is a perfect world, right? I think every two to four weeks pushing some kind of meaningful update to your site is what is going to help your nonprofit thrive online. That seems a little ambitious but I see a lot of organizations, they launch a website, they let it sit and then it slowly decays and their organization changes over time. The number one reason that I hear that people wanna redesign their website is it no longer matches our organization. The reason why is that the organization has changed but the website hasn't caught up. So if you have an organizational habit and I think it's a habit really of updating your website every couple of weeks and just maintaining a list of here's all the things that we're working through and this is our roadmap and we're just gonna take these couple of things off the top and over the next two or four weeks we're gonna work on this, we're gonna update this here, we're gonna adjust this here. Then you maintain your website over time and all of a sudden you actually get more value out of it because you've maintained it and kept it up to date with your organization and you can probably put off or avoid an expensive redesign down the road because you've actually been taking the time and develop the habit to keep your website up to date. Yeah, thank you for that. And like we said, that's the perfect world. So we've talked about integrating all of this and that was my final question truly was how often should we really be working on this and identifying those tools? Thank you, Spencer. It's been a fantastic conversation. Spencer is the founder and principal with Brooks Digital. Please do check him out at brooks.digital. Fantastic friend, glad to have you here. I've learned a lot. I dabble and play in the website space because maybe I'm that person also that you mentioned Spencer that might know a thing or two about spreadsheets. It's like, I know just enough to be dangerous but you've shared some really fantastic nuggets of information. So thank you so very much. You're very welcome, Jared. I appreciate you having me on the show. Yeah, it's been a great conversation. I'm so glad that we could have you here. Julia, I hope you're enjoying your time away. I'm Jared Ransom. Loved having this conversation with you, Spencer. And again, we have to say thank you, thank you, thank you and give some shout outs to our amazing presenting sponsors. Thanks to Bloomerang, American Nonprofit Academy, Fundraising Academy with the National University, non-profit nerd, your part-time controller, staffing boutique and the non-profit thought leader. These companies keep us going and growing. They're here to do just that same thing for you and your mission in, around and throughout your community. Now's a great time to check them out. So I know we mentioned them earlier in the show. I hope that you listened to everything that our guest, Spencer Brooks, had to share with you but now's a great time to look into our sponsors. So thanks again, Spencer. It's been fantastic. I'm thankful that you could spend your time with us. I hope that you get more sunshine in the Pacific Northwest. And I'm even wearing yellow for you today. My nails are all orbs of yellow for you. So yeah, thank you so much. And thanks to all of our viewers and listeners that have tuned in. We ask each and every day, please stay well, say you can do well. Thanks for joining us today and we'll see you all back here tomorrow.