 All right, I think we have almost everybody in from the chat, they'll start from the waiting room will have, I'm sure they'll be filtering in as we go on. But I'm Shelly read welcome to our short webinar today on planning for website projects. We have Laura Quinn who is a member of our community who contributes to our lists are often. So she's going to share her knowledge with us. Welcome Laura. Thank you so much for having me I'm really excited. And as Shelly mentioned, we're experimenting with a format here which is a really quick energetic burst of information. So I'm going to in fact go through seven tips for planning for websites in somewhat less than half an hour because I'm going to leave a little bit of room for questions at the end. So the information will be quite fast paced. You will get the slides and the recording so you can go back through it again, should you care to. So this is in fact what we're going to cover. We're going to start with goals and audiences and stakeholders, thinking about the balance of your time money scope and polish. I think a little bit about branding which I feel like not enough people think about upfront, whether you should be doing a quick hits phase while you think about a longer website project, the budget range for your project, and then getting the word out. So this is primarily very much up at the front of the project, prior to perhaps bringing in a consultant, but it does not assume that you're going to bring in a consultant so it is all going to be applicable whether you are or not. Who am I? I am Laura S Quinn. I am a consultant specializing in websites for nonprofits including a lot of work with folks in the legal aid space. I do two things. I am a coach and guide to staff who are working on websites either internally or working with another vendor. So perhaps in our or two hour calls a week to two hour long calls a week to help them guide the guide through the process of what's happening and is what the vendor is telling me legit, what should I expect, what are deliverables. I also do website strategy. So those of you who are kind of thinking about a project but aren't quite sure how to get there. I do projects to help define what should be in a website. All right, let's dive in. What are the goals and audiences? This is something that you're probably thinking about, but I didn't want to leave it out. So it's really important to think through what it is you want to achieve with your website. So what does success look like when you've actually completed the project that you have in mind? What are you going to increase or decrease? Who are your audiences? So do you have many of them? So for instance, if you're creating a website for a legal aid organization, you might have everything from low income audiences to donors to governments to all sorts of people could be in your target audiences. And then I find that it's really useful to sketch what success might look like from that audiences perspective. So to say, okay, for each audience, so for instance, we're here saying potentially intake staff is one of the key audiences for this staff. That implies that for instance your staff is going to, sorry, your website is going to be doing some online intake. So from the perspective of intake staff, what do they want from the site, as well as what your organization kind of wants them to want, what your goals are for that audience. That's a little bit meta that particular audience because it's already internal. But okay, how about donors? You logically want your donors to give more money, but that's probably not what the donors are, you know, intrinsically desiring to do on your site. By the way, I'm happy to, as Shelly's put in the chat, happy to take questions ongoing. I'll be answering probably a few as we go along, and I will be even in our short timeframe leaving a little bit of time at the end for your questions. All right, number two, you want to make sure that you know who your stakeholders are, and you've got them approximately on the same page. You want to think through both, do you have enough people on your stakeholder team, and also, this is insanely too many stakeholders to have actually be involved in every decision. You can't be everyone, so you need to have some people representing other people. You've taken a crack at audiences and goals in some ways. Do you want to make sure that they're approximately on board with them? And you want to know how to make decisions. So, especially if you're anything approaching like this many people, you don't want to just have everybody in a room to fight it out. That's just going to be madness. I want to think through the balance for your organization of time, money, and scope. I'm going to add a fourth thing into that mix. So you've probably heard about this triangle, which is often talked about on technology and in fact other projects, where you have time and money, where you have one, so logically you could spend potentially a ton of staff time and not have to spend as much money, or you could just outsource the whole thing, pay consultants or a firm to do the whole project for you and not have to spend hardly any staff time. There certainly still will be staff time, but not as much. So there's a trade off between those two. You'll certainly want to think about skills in terms of staff time, because even if you have tons, you know, like all of us do you have tons of time you're just sitting around twiddling your thumbs, you don't necessarily have the skills that you'll need in order to build a website so you want to think about the skills that you might want that you don't have like a graphic design, for instance, or plain language writing, or, you know, there's a whole host of things you might not have. If you don't have much of either staff time or money, which is the boat that many of us are in, you'll need to decrease the scope of what your website will do and be. Then you need to say all right it will be less ambitious it will cover less stuff we're going to do less at least in the first phase. We're often tempting to instead of reducing the scope to reduce the polish. So to say, alright we're going to do a really fast and dirty site, we're going to build it ourselves, even though we don't have graphic design skills in house or a lot of technical tools in house. That's a dangerous path you want to make sure that you know kind of what you're doing there, because if you decide to put something off that doesn't have that much polish. It's hard to go back. To then change the perception of whatever that is as perhaps not as polished and professional as you might like it. So that's something that's more appropriate to kind of a pilot program. Something that is doesn't have a lot of stakeholders who might be expecting a polished thing than something that's for instance, the face of your whole organization. So very much hand in hand with polish. Actually backing up a step is thinking about your branding. And when I'm talking about branding here I'm not so much thinking about graphic design. As I'm thinking about how you talk about yourself, particularly if you are thinking about your project as yourself as a website for yourself as an organization for external folks like donors particularly or funders for external audiences who aren't the beneficiaries of your programs. So if you don't have a easy and clear differentiated vision as to what you do that is different than what everybody else does, then a new website project could be a good time, a good impetus for that kind of project. So what we're looking at here is branding for the legal aid society that was done by a branding firm called constructive. So you can see there's a lot to this and in fact the maybe I'll put in the slides a link for you to go look at the case study on the constructive websites. There's a whole brand's deck that defines what they do, what they value, what they value, some of the key differentiators. And to whatever extent you look at this and say, well anybody could say that. So, for instance, we increase access to justice does possibly there's something about the way they define it or it's just really important to have in the mix. But to the extent that you think one could say that about any organization, it's not as differentiated as you would like. So you'd really want to think about, do I have this defined for my organization or project or website in a way that you couldn't just say about virtually anyone. If you're doing it for your state. I think it's totally fine that it is pretty similar to what's in other states. But it shouldn't be that all right your legal aid organization in northeastern Virginia is pretty indistinguishable from any other legal aid organization. I mean you've got the location there. I don't know you want to think it through at least you want to know what what your opinion is there. This is not cheap to do. It's you can do some branding by yourself on the cheap. But in general, it's my experience is that it's tricky to do well, and tends to run in the thousands of dollars at least to hire a consultant to do it and you could easily probably relate society. If I were to guess, I guess they spent tens of thousands of dollars possibly 40 or $50,000 on on this work. Let's think about a quick hits phase. So, if you're doing a big project, it could take many months to get out there into the world. So, in the process of doing that work, you probably already have something in the world, none of us. But if it's a brand new thing and then conceivably you can wait. But most of us already have something in the world. Do you want to make any changes to tide you over. So this can be valuable. I just wanted to say, all right, well here are, you know, four key pain points, and we're going to do some work to address those where we're going to just do some design and some build, while we are waiting for the entirety of the website. Maybe as I'm saying it can be valuable, but you also need to be careful that you don't derail the more strategic project by just doing more and more quick hits, instead of something that is actually strategic in the long run. If you want if it makes more sense to do a new site or a site redesign, you want to make sure you turn your attention to it, as opposed to just rolling with more and more and more and more and more quick hits. And one of the ways that you could help yourself with this if you wanted to is to if you're doing a RFP, and I'll talk a little bit in a second about what an RFI stands for, but it's an RFP like process, if you're going to hire a consultant to do the project, the larger project and most certainly, you'd want to either have an old consultant who is working with you or the new consultant do the product you don't want some totally different process running with some totally different organization. So you could have the same incoming consultant also do your quick hits project. Sorry, I think I was very confusing there in talking about consultants. So you basically you either want to do your quick hits in the same way you've always done them, or you want to work with your new consultant to do them. You wouldn't want to have some totally different third party in the mix. That would almost certainly derail you think about your budget range. So for those of you who are thinking about doing an RFP or some kind of process. I think it's too common. And I have strong feelings about using that process to try to determine what your budget is. I feel personally that that leads to all sorts of confusion and things going awry. So I feel strongly that you should have a sense as to what your budget range should be in order to issue your RFP or RFI. So if you're doing the whole thing in house, logically, the budget is going to be a much smaller piece of the overall project. Then you'd actually you'd want to think about your staff time as your equivalent thing here how much staff is going into this particular project. Because it's going to be just a huge portion of what it is that's possible to do. So what's your new goal about thinking about this? Well, I think probably the most important way is to talk to other organizations who have done similar projects. Those of us who are in the legal aid realm, the legal services realm, we have an advantage of being in a really fairly close knit community with folks who are willing to, to share information about their sites. In the nonprofit spaces a whole, there's a lot less competition about these numbers than in a lot of other areas. So talking to people can be a really useful way to find out what other people have paid. So as you think through, you want to decide how much you're going to do in house, how much will be outsourced, you want to decide if you're going to do branding or not, that's going to be a big piece of your, your, well, not necessarily a big piece of your budget, but it would certainly be a factor in your budget. Like if you're doing a $10,000 website, you probably can't just throw branding in there because it's going to be several thousand dollars at least in of itself. You want to get approximate buy-in on your budget from your leadership. Logically, you don't want to send out a RFP or an RFI until you have buy-in. Here is some, just a very hand-wavy scale as to what web projects might look like. And I'm actually working on an article on about how to estimate your site, possibly with a calculator if I can get my head around how to actually do calculator type stuff for that. So 10,000 is probably as low as you can go. It's a simple site by a freelancer. I mean, you can go lower than that if you're just talking about a site for an individual, but I've been kind of assuming that we're talking about an organization or a project site. So 25,000 small firm, pretty good marketing site without a lot of specific functionality, without a lot of complexity. 50,000 more complexity, larger firm. 100,000 even more complexity or top firms. So if you're talking about top website firms in this sector, a lot of them don't get a bed for $100,000. So a lot of the names that you may have heard may be on your reach for a lower budget. And then once you get into the realm of $200,000, you've got a lot of ability to make your choice of what you're doing and who you're working with. So obviously, not everything is possible. There are sites that are, you know, half a million dollars to build. And our last tip though, certainly I'm always eager. And I am hoping that you have questions or we're actually going to end early on our half hour or probably I'll go back and just add more color to earlier slides. And think about, if you are looking to work with a consultant or a firm, think about how you're going to go about that process. A couple of thoughts here. So if you have a firm that you like or a couple of firms that you've worked with, I would encourage you to go with them as especially as opposed to doing an artificial RFP. So if you have funders that require you to do an RFP, then you're going to have to do an RFP. But from the perspective of a consultant, I can tell you that it's bringing down the whole world of people who go on your project. If you put it out an RFP, just to check who's out there. So you can, you know, 90% likely go with whoever you want to go with, because it takes hours, it takes eight hours, 10 hours more to submit an actual proposal to an RFP. If you think you'll likely stay with who you have, but you want to look around, ask other organizations for their thoughts. So kind of widen the pool a bit without putting it out to a whole RFP process. It means things more manageable for you. And it means that there's not so very many people working on proposals that are essentially likely to fall into a pit of nothingness. And so if you're going to put it out to bid, something that I am, I've just started talking a lot about and I'm about to talk about more, I is to think about a request for information process rather than a request for proposals process. My idea here is that rather than ask is sending out a widespread call to send detailed proposals with prices and schedules and processes, which are very time consuming to respond to send out a request for information, the response to which is a letter of request that primarily collects information that firms already have. So some of the key things that you can get is a how many projects they, what percentage of projects they do that are in your budget range that are in your general price point. Please give me case studies for things that you have done that are like my project. Please send that send me your website, from which you can glean a lot of information about their, what are the priorities they tell the world about. Who is their leadership team that they tell the world about. Do they say anything on their website about their commitment to equity and diversity. I would argue that it's much more telling whether there's anything on their website about that, then what they'll put in a proposal to you if you ask the question. So the idea here is you do a widespread request for information. You get higher level letters of interest from more from more people who are more tailored to your price range and things you say you want in your, your RFI. And you then do another round to either talk to them or get detailed RFPs, sorry, to get detailed proposals from them with, excuse me, with price points and with a literal price that they contract to do and process. So the huge advantage here is you will, you spread a broader net, because there's a lot of consultants and firms who will not answer RFPs, because it's this very low likelihood crapshoot at the moment of whether or not you'll get the proposal. So you're less likely to reach smaller firms who are more likely to be run by women or people of color. You're more likely to be getting proposals from firms that have a more money set aside for the kind of their sales process and marketing process. All right, I went down a little bit of a rabbit hole around RFIs because I didn't have any questions, so I am going there. So that is my official end. I would love questions on this planning process as you have them. I will also, I'm just going to, I'll go back to the beginning to, to start again with some additional tips for, because I could certainly talk about any of these slides for pretty much a half hour in of themselves. If you're interested in this topic, definitely reach out to me, take a look at my website, sign up for my e-newsletter or follow me on LinkedIn. I'm very active on LinkedIn, where I'm publishing a lot of resources on this type of thing. In fact, stuff coming out on defining your audience goal, that you're finding your audience's goals, thinking about the, sorry, thinking about the budget for your website, and a whole lot of stuff coming out about RFIs because I'm going down a rabbit hole to try to get people to do RFIs, including a template. I'm publishing a template very soon. So Laura, we have a question. They're asking if the slides or the recording will be shared, but they're asking about the slides as well. Absolutely. So, Shelly, you have the slides, feel free to share those as well as the recording. Mary is asking how to sign up for the newsletter. Thank you so much. It is, if you go to that URL, Laura Esquim.com, there is an email, sign up there. I will also jot your name down. So if I don't see you sign up, I can follow up with you because I absolutely want to get you on. Great. And what questions can I answer for you in our last three minutes for those of you who are thinking about projects? Feel free to unmute or just drop them in the chat. I know that as we go through our website project, this is all really helpful. I think that it's going to be valuable to other people as well. Oh, and here we have another question. Can you put a quantitative number on website complexity or large firm? Ah, so going back to that slide. Yes. That's where things start to get really tricky around like a, getting like doing a website calculator. Is it tricky? So a large firm. Yes, absolutely. I can quantify that a little bit more. So I would say, so a firm that has more than 10 people or so and or has national name recognition in the legal aid space. I don't know it's kind of what I would call large obviously there's a spectrum here it's not like you suddenly flip into large. There are a lot of smaller firms that are only a couple of people. Or in fact that are essentially run by a single person and they have a fair amount of freelancers and subcontractors, which if you're looking to do something on a smaller budget, that can be a really interesting way to go there's more risk to having a lot depending on one or just a couple people, but there's always there's always risk and honestly having a big firm doesn't assume doesn't necessarily mean the firm is any good or there's for more complex projects. You can start to think about how different your project is from other projects that you see a lot. So if for instance you are putting up a website for a legal aid organization and a lot of it is very similar to not only other legal aid organizations but but organizations of any kind, then likely it's pretty low complexity. If you start thinking about things that you're going to want to build specific to yourself like online intake trees, and it's a project and you're gonna you're kind of inventing what it is as you go along and there's nothing like you, that's all going to add complexity. Fabulous. That actually brings us to the end of our action packed half hour. I would love your thoughts in the chat as you leave. As I suspect that we're all busy people as how useful you thought this is can you give me a score from one to 10 in the chat as to how useful you felt this was I'm curious about the format and about the just the usefulness of the information. And I'm going to be around for another couple minutes at least if anybody wants to ask any late breaking questions. Otherwise, thank you so much for attending and I'll see you again soon. Thank you so much everyone will have this posted to our YouTube page or YouTube channel soon. And we hope to see you at our next webinar.