 Hello, and welcome to this TechSoup hosted webinar. My name is Aretha Simons. I'm the webinar producer here at TechSoup. We're gonna be talking about maximizing impact. That's very important. You wanna maximize your impact, right? So we're talking about website, nonprofit website planning, budgeting, and design. I'm gonna give you the housekeeping rules. Somebody's already turned on the closed caption. If you need the closed caption, just type on the CC button at the bottom of your screen. This is being recorded. You're gonna get the video replay. You're gonna get the slides. It's probably by tomorrow. I'm gonna make sure they go to your inbox and make sure you click on that YouTube page and hit a thumbs up if you enjoyed the video. And if you learned something cool today, go ahead and share it with us here and hashtag TechSoup on all your social media platforms. So I'm gonna give you one more announcement and then I'm gonna move out the way. If you have not heard of Quad, I'm gonna put a link of Quad in the, about Quad in the chat room. Quad is a peer-to-peer community we hear at TechSoup. If you remember Quad, put a one in the chat. I always like to know who's a member of Quad, but we have exclusive events just for Quad members. Again, I'm gonna put a link in the chat so you can learn more about Quad on your own. And also when you get this slide, you can click on the hyperlink. But I'm gonna turn it over to the founders of TAP Network. We have the founders of TAP Network. How often do you have the founders here doing a webinar? Over to you, Kyle and Joe. Have a great webinar guys. Great, thanks, Sarita. Hi, I'm Joe DiGiovanni. I'm one of the co-founders of TAP Network. And with me is Kyle Barkins. Good morning, good afternoon. We're excited to be here. Today we're gonna talk about maximizing your website and really get into detail on not just that, because to maximize your website, you're gonna need budget and we'll go through the different ways that we budget and we work with a lot of nonprofits. The best way to budget for your website, taking a growth-driven design approach, we'll go through in detail on that. And then we'll look at some of TechSoup's website offerings to see if there's an opportunity to support your website development efforts. Great, so just a quick background. With TAP Network, we work with a lot of global purpose-driven organizations. We work with Toyota, Denso, a lot of clients from an international standpoint. And what we like to do is take our learnings, whether it's learning management systems, web portals, and port that over to the nonprofit space. So we're TechSoup's exclusive provider for nonprofit website services and digital marketing. So we've launched over 3,000 websites in the nonprofit space. I wanna bring some of our expertise and learnings to you and answer questions because we're all learning together, especially with AI and a lot of new tools and technologies that are coming into the space. So we'll quickly get started. So today, we'll talk about website development, but website development also involves a lot of different initiatives as well. That's strategy, creative branding, e-commerce. So we'll talk about some of these things, but through TechSoup, we offer this full suite of services. So as you're developing your website and wanna bring it to life, integrate marketing and then really drive impact, whether it's fundraising or engaging your community, making an impact, measuring that impact, all these pieces will come together. But today, we'll go into website development and a few more of these. First thing we want to do is start off with a poll. Now, what is the biggest challenge your nonprofit faces when it comes to website planning, budgeting and design? And you can just put it in the chat. You know, is it a limited budget for your website development? Is it uncertainty about aligning your website goals and your mission? Is it difficulty in creating, engaging, impactful website content? AI is making that a bit easier, but there's challenges there. And then challenges in ensuring website accessibility and user experience. All the above, A and C. We're flying blind. Yep. Finding a full stack developer, that's key. Yeah, so it seems like, I mean, everyone's having a challenge with budget content, engaging content, content that'll rise above the clutter, uncertainty with website goals and nonprofit missions. So we'll address those today and hopefully we'll get you on the right foot. So in terms of the next slide, strategic planning. So let's start there with a lot of our clients. When we talk about strategic planning, we take a marketing approach per se when it comes to websites. So if you know what your website is going to do in terms of engaging your client. So if you're looking at a marketing plan, you take a full funnel approach. At the top of the funnel, it's awareness and then you have consideration, engagement and then promoter. In case of your website, you want people to come to that website and right off the bat in your header, you want them to know what you do while you do it and the purpose. And then with content, that was the question number C is, that's the middle part of the funnel. That's consideration. That's where your educational content comes in and then engagement. That's where that full stack developer comes in, the CRM. How are you engaging your clients on your website and then activating them, integrating social media, integrating email, all those other pieces. So when folks come to your website, in some cases you could do all this on your landing page, right on your homepage. But in most cases, it's gonna be the different parts of your website working together. So we'll go through all that today. So step one is aligning your website goals with your nonprofit mission. This comes down to being able to explain your core values, the objectives and activities of your nonprofit on your website, but also being able to put the tools in place to actually achieve those objectives and then to have the content that really drives that messaging home and then aligning the website goals with your brand identity. So step one is what is your nonprofit's goals? What is your website's goals and how do they align? And most cases that they align almost 100%. Your website really being the engine that drives your mission and your fundraising. For step two, it's identifying your key target audiences. And what's super challenging about being a nonprofit, we've worked in the public space as well. And in public space, you have B2C companies who just, they market to consumers, B2B, they market to businesses. And you have B2G, they're engaging government. So for nonprofits, the challenge that a lot of you face is you're doing all three. You're trying to serve your community and you're targeting consumers, but you're also trying to raise donations to peer-to-peer fundraising from consumers. The B2B aspect is engaging stakeholders and partners and corporate funders. And then B2G is the grants and working within the community and policy. So identifying those audiences, breaking them down and then ultimately mapping out the messaging that you wanna have for them. But it's super critical to do that. And as, like I said, nonprofits, it's more challenging and I think in businesses to really do that. So that would be step number two is take a look at all those different stakeholders and audiences. And then step three is defining the objectives, the key performance indicators. So if it's stakeholders, how many corporate funders are you looking to engage? Or is it just trying to get meetings? It's gonna be difficult to nearly impossible to have a corporate fund that come in and say, here's $10,000. You're really using the website to educate them, gain a meeting and do those face-to-face pieces of all that. But on the consumer standpoint, if you're trying to address the community, let's say you're a diabetes association, you're addressing diabetics, nutrition and exercise, you wanna get that right content out there. And that traffic could be people committing to that or seeing their doctor or just becoming educated and reading certain materials. So each audience is gonna have different objectives. Some are gonna be fiscal, some are gonna be more behavior change and looking at those and mapping. And for step four, next slide is putting together, taking a look at your existing content. What we'll generally do is once you know who your audiences are, taking a look at your content, doing a content audience and seeing where those gaps are. So for funders, what content do you have? What content do you wanna keep, replace or edit? And we'll map all that out. You can do it in Excel, we'll use Airtable, but really doing a content audit and looking at the member journey and seeing how those align. And in a lot of cases, you'll see that the content needs to be refreshed or cleaned up or just the way from a UI UX standpoint that folks are getting to that content, there might be some roadblocks there. So that's step four. And here's just an example of a user journey mapping. This is a nonprofit that recruits healthcare providers. So when you're looking at your nonprofit, you're not just driving people to the website because you're gonna have multiple audiences, you're gonna have specific landing pages for each audience. So mapping out that user journey. At the top, that's the funnel going left to right, awareness, consideration, engage and capture, you're getting their email addresses. In this case, they're filling out an application to apply for a job. It could be the app, instead of application, that could be, they're making a donation or they're volunteering. But mapping out that journey is critical. And that's a really great way to really set up kind of the strategic portion of what you're doing and then taking a look at the budgeting to do all this. And Kyle will dig in into all that. Yeah, great, thanks, Joe. We wanted to cover the initial kind of planning for success because we understand there's a certain budget and I'll just jump right into this poll question. I'll leave it up there. So what is your biggest challenge when it comes to budgeting for your nonprofit's website if you just throw those in the chat? So is it determining the appropriate allocation of funds? Is it finding cost-effective solutions without sacrificing quality? So do you do it yourself or outsource it basically? Is it making sure that you have the correct budgetary resources and or is it maximizing ROI with those funds? And of course there can be all of them or a mix of those. Interesting to see what you all say in the chat but I'll come back to that to my earlier point. Before you jump in and say, hey, we need to build this website. It's kind of good, it's better to answer the why and what you want to improve. So to Joe's point, what are those objectives? What are the key results you're looking to achieve? What content exists? How big is that lift gonna be? As Joe mentioned, we've done a couple of thousand websites. We've done some of our past lives, some more of those as part of TAP, especially for nonprofits and one of the biggest challenges we often face is that content phase because there's either a lot there and the organizations don't know how to disseminate that efficiently and effectively to their audience or they think they have enough and once it comes time to start building that website, they start to realize, oh, this isn't put together sufficiently or there's some gaps here and then that will often delay the project. So it looks like a lot of people are saying A through D or all of the above and that's kind of common. That's what we see pretty frequently. Typically the ones that stand out that people identify would be having a finally cost effective solution, deciding if they're gonna do this themselves, try to take this on their own, if they're gonna pay someone else to do it and then what that budget looks like. So we hope we can ask some of those questions today or follow up the follow up conversation. So just some factors that we often see that influence that website budget where it's gonna, that price is gonna creep up or where you're gonna see an increased cost over time. What we would just be thinking of like the complexity of the features. So thinking this is like not fighting off more than you can chew as an organization as well as like what's mission critical. And we'll talk about our growth-driven design, our launch pad style development where we hope to eliminate a lot of these types of concerns as we go. Customization requirements. So trying to get hyper specific on your website or that needs to do something exactly this way and sometimes often forgetting that the end user is the one that you should be appealing to, not just a personal preference. Select the right platform. So platforms can have a cost, the cost of building on a platform can have an enhanced cost as well. So even though it might be, let's just say you get Wix for free or something like that, but if the platform doesn't fit your needs, there's gonna be a cost to either customize it or eventually to move off of that. And then thinking of external services, things you're currently using, things that you're planning to use. Do they integrate with that website? So to Joe, that user journey mapping, is your website gonna work with your forms and your email marketing or any of your automation or any of your social media platforms? And then all the while thinking about this from the terms of scalability and future growth needs. I'm sure there are plenty of organizations on here that are happy with where they are. Maybe it's like sort of like a part-time role for you or part-time type of organization where you're trying to spread some awareness about a specific cause and it doesn't really need to grow much over time. But there are also many that have these initiatives where they need to grow revenue, grow donations, grow funding year-over-year, grow impact year-over-year. So just like your organization, your website needs to be scalable and built for that future growth as well. When you're determining how you're gonna budget, we like to create a priorization sort of matrix or outline here. So you start with that needs assessment, which we would show touched on originally and align your goals with this investment and then look at evaluating what that impact's gonna be. So what's the potential ROI of these investments? How quickly are you gonna see a return from these things? So if it's like increasing donations or increasing event attendance or registration, what does that impact look like? Think about how this is going to optimize your resources. So a lot of times, yes, the cost of the website might be a little bit more, but if that gets you a few hours a week or a few hours a month back because your website's able to work better for you or even work is almost like replace someone in a specific role so that they can spend their time doing something else, like driving more donations or doing more outreach. Are you able to optimize those resources with this new website? What does that look like from a cost or a cost benefit analysis for you? And then just think about the flexibility and adaptability of whatever you're investing in. How can it grow with you? As we mentioned, how can you add pieces on to the future? How can you be sure that you're not capped at what you've put out there now so you're gonna have to come back and do the same thing over again in a year or so. When it comes down to allocating the budget, we sort of break this down into where this money goes. So there's, we break it down to sort of like development maintenance and then like marketing after this is launched to the first phase is that initial design, the functionality. So if you've done the background work and identified like what content needs to be ported over and you have an understanding of what your customers or your potential customers or supporters should be doing on the website and what purpose your website serves, then it's figuring out what that design is gonna look like coming up with multiple designs possibly for different pages, building out the functionality. So that's the first piece. How much are you allocating for that? And then what is the ongoing maintenance looks like? So you might not spend a bunch upfront but if you get a ton of visitors and there's a lot of complexities in the website or you've picked the platform that has a substantial ongoing cost, what does that look like from a maintenance, hosting, security, upkeep standpoint? And that could be platform costs. It can also be personnel costs. So if you're not, you know if you're frequently going to be making updates to your website, you know ensuring that that doesn't become cost prohibitive having to pay someone whether that's on staff or external and understanding what that cost looks like. And then obviously, you know if you spend all this time and resources and money on launching the website you wanna make sure it gets out that you wanna make sure people see it. So being sure to plan for and allocate some budget for, you know a launch that's gonna promote this website that, you know whether that's just something more organic and you're creating post through social media or if you're going to do a larger sort of PR push you know, there's actual costs and then there's the, you know the internal costs or the marketing or like the agency costs that come along with that. So jumping into our next poll thinking about what we just talked about how much have you we wanna know how much you've all budgeted for, you know your web and digital marketing we're really thinking about over the course of a year but this can be just project-based as well. So A is we haven't be less than $5,000 C between five to 25,000 and D is more than 25,000 so something a little bit more cost of a full-time employee or more. Seems like a good mix coming through people saying, you know we haven't and then looks like a lot under 25,000 but some over the $5,000 range it's good to see a good mix there and really not unexpected. I think, you know we expect to see you know kind of that mix there and but we also wanna make sure that not having the budget it doesn't isn't gonna preclude you from, you know having putting it your best a good foot forward and having a website, you know taking that first step to make sure that you you've got like a presentable usable kind of cross-platform site available for your organization and as I said earlier not biting off more than you can choose so not trying to do everything all at once and outlining, you know what's sort of mission critical for your organization if you don't have the budget at this point to get there or don't have the resources at this point to get there. So some ways to maximize that would be just setting measurable goals for you upfront. So understand what your objectives are you know if you're a small one or two person organization with a limited budget and you say you wanna raise a million dollars this year online that's probably a pipe dream like so we wanna make sure that we set something that's realistic and measurable. So look at like what's your size your market looks like and what's really attainable for you and how you can get that through your website. Make sure once you do that that you're able to track and analyze the performance of your site that could be your current site to see how you're performing now so you can set those goals that could also be you know this future site so that you're able to track against that. Always be optimizing so you'll hear us talk about this a lot more and more if you talk to us following this webinar but always look for you know the opportunity to optimize and update so measure what's there see what's working see what's not working and be able to make be able to pivot as necessary so whether that's like reducing the number of clicks it takes to get to a donation form or taking some of that friction out for someone who's navigating your site or getting to your site. To that point you know like the number of clicks it takes the friction and navigation make sure that you're investing whether it's time resources or money in the user experience and keeping that updated user experience can cover everything from just how easy it is for someone to use the website or how accessible your website is so that people who might be visually impaired or might not have access to fast to a high speed internet connection or might be on a mobile device be sure that they can all get what's what's needed out of your website and it's not alienating someone when they're when they're visiting your website and then ultimately kind of going back to those those goals and analyze and performance use those insights to to to guide you forward so look at this as a constantly iterative process over time so with that in mind we can start we can jump into impactful design a website so that user experience and what makes a great nonprofit website so we talked about scalability and flexibility we'll touch more on user experience and then also integration opportunity so how do you bring things besides just the core website itself in to be part of your entire marketing mix one of the first things you're going to want to pick and one of the where that price is going to depend on you know an actual cost for a platform or the cost to develop on the platform is the content management system so this is where you know you're putting the content in where your templates live on top of this where the design lives and it makes it hopefully user friendly and easy for you someone in your organization or an agency or someone you partner with to make updates to the content to be sure that you know when something changes it doesn't completely change the entire look and feel of the website and all kind of feels cohesive across the board and is something that you can scale and on top of so on this screen these are just a few examples on the left side on my left side of the screen you'll see like Wix and Squarespace so these are managed content management systems these can be there's of course you know not a problem with discounts available but these are you know hosted by the companies there so it's all kind of packed so packaged up so to speak a lot of a lot of flexibility with these but it's not sort of unlimited flexibility so you can't do as much development on or into those as you could with other platforms like the open source ones on the screen WordPress, Drupal and Joomla again there's others out there these are just sort of like the industry standards and you know we've kind of highlighted the one that we work on most frequently being WordPress as there's such a large development team so to speak out there with 40 million or so people using WordPress with more than half or more than a quarter of all websites on the internet in 2023 being built on WordPress and some of the biggest organizations you'll see have chosen WordPress as their platform of choice nice thing about that is there's no actual cost to WordPress it's just the cost for the resources to develop onto it and then if you have any like paid plug-ins or things like that that integrate with it once you select the platform you know and you've done your kind of content audit it's important to outline what that site architecture is going to look like so that's this is generally thinking of like how someone's going to navigate your site but this is that hierarchy of how someone's how that content's going to be laid out so this you might often hear this called information architecture you might hear it you know called site architecture one thing we like to do that makes this a little bit easier is like being able to take you know every page that you're going to have on your website write them out onto index cards put them on a table and figure out where or you know on a wall if you got posted notes and figure out you know how things are how things lay out hierarchically so you know the homepage is going to be the top level maybe about us as we see on the screen here is going to be the top level and what we do and then the things that that show up underneath that and and try to make this as concise and organized as possible and then once you have that see you know start then you can start to get further down that funnel and outline how you know what audience is going to be going to go to those what those pages what their their user flow is going to look like then we want to think about as I talked about so not just mobile optimization but this is really user experience so being sure that you know someone visits your website from a mobile device maybe they're on a slower connections obviously typically going to be a smaller screen but they're still able to engage and and and get the most out of out of your website and from your organization so think about you know reducing the size of images and assets on the site so the site can load quickly also selecting a host so that you know a good host that that can deliver that that site quickly be sure the sizing changes for the screen so you'll often go to a website you'll see you have to like pinch or zoom or something like that because it's not really optimized for mobile it's not responsive ensure that the layout is is optimized for mobile too so you know if you have a bunch of things scrunched next to each other it makes it harder to see harder to read that's probably not the optimal experience for a user or on a mobile device ensure that that you know you can see the activity you can and someone can see what's what's meant to be a button what's meant to be a link what's meant to be a point of engagement on the site and give them a way to engage so you know look at like having forms having you know a natural progression of how someone's going to navigate through your site just as they were on a desktop but this is more important more and more important every day as people are choosing their their their mobile devices where they they're they get their email they're conducting business from their mobile device it's kind of always you know in their hand or in their pocket so it's a great way to be able to reach them with your marketing efforts and be sure that you're driving them to that that you know newer updated web assets you've created and just an example here of what you know mobile optimization looks like on the left you see what this looks like what their website would look like on a on a desktop in the middle you'd see sort of what the the kind of common mobile optimization would look like but then on the right side you see what the ideal optimized page looks like so it's it's not just a scaled down version of the website it's actually you see the contact us and then donate now are right there so that the user can engage and you see that there's some of their content showing above the fold so it gives you the usually the concept of being able to scroll down and see more and that that image that picture just as it is on the desktop is available so there's some some imagery something that that kind of jumps out at you when you when you first reach that page and then just kind of lastly but certainly not the most least important is thinking about what else is going to integrate into your website how can you automate you know things within the website or within your web within your web presence so that would be stuff like your CRM so your constituent relationship management are going to call contact relationship management those platforms make sure that that you know somebody fills out a website a form on your website that's going to at least talk to that CRM or at least be able to push that information in so you can see who's done what when things of that nature marketing automation tools to think things like active campaign or HubSpot or MailChimp being sure that you know when someone takes an action on your website you can follow up and engage with them so that you can take some of the manual effort manual work out of that this is really important especially for donation donors and fundraisers so being sure if someone does donate you're thanking them kind of quickly and it's a personalized message and then you also created a mechanism to follow up with them to say hey your donation would go a lot further when it's shared here's a link to share this with a friend or you know other kind of common follow up and automation and then other donation and fundraising tools so depending on which donor platform or donor management platform or fundraising platforms you might use just some examples of things that you should that you should be thinking about and planning when you're building or rebuilding a website. I'll turn it over to Jody to give us a little bit more background on the growth driven design methodology that we follow to happen we highly recommend you all start thinking about when you're planning these redesigns. Thanks Kyle. Yeah, so launching a new website's daunting it's easier to attend webinars and talk about it than actually go through it but you know it's kind of like doing your taxes I guess so question we have here is once the last time you update it or redesign your website let's see yeah over two to three years yesterday, congrats. Yes, on average you know, most non-profits we did a benchmark study last year it's around two to three years when folks redo their website and then the big challenges you know how much of a redevelopment is that is it relaunching the entire website or is it is it improving elements of it so today we're going to talk about a growth driven design approach that that we have versus traditional approaches. So if you think of traditional traditional website design that's generally a very arduous process takes up to a year very large budget and in a lot of cases once it's done maybe your mission has changed technology has changed and it might not be as relevant from a tech stack standpoint as well as kind of really addressing your mission. So things are happening now in this new age of acceleration so fast that taking a huge undertaking and building this massive website over a course of a year may not be the best approach and that's kind of what we've seen especially for non-profits on a budget it's this agile approach to to building websites. So you know we kind of want to get away from the high cost long time lines and limited updates post launch. So you know as you're building this there's not much you can do and you're stuck with this old website that's not achieving what you want to achieve and your new website is getting delayed it's taking forever. So the approach that we take is a growth driven design versus traditional design and what that means is having a quick launch website something that you can launch quickly and then iterate over time with a a shorter budget quicker getting the market quicker and at the end of the day you know along this whole time timeline your website is still efficient and achieving your needs instead of being stuck in this one or two year bog where you might not be achieving your results and stuck with your old website. So what's that look like? Here's the big picture. So first we come up with the strategy kind of like we talked in the beginning of the presentation and we map out what's a launchpad website what is the you know minimum viable product that is going to get you up but make a big impact and in this case in a lot of cases with with nonprofits it's really getting your story down the design the user experience mainly the home page and that could be done inexpensively and then the other bells and whistles that you might want to add down the road more details on you know could be a resource center or more integrated donation platform but in the beginning it's really getting your messaging and your voice across on your website and then it's a continuous improvement process so we launch that launchpad website and then we develop it it goes live we monitor it we learn we transfer that knowledge back and it's a continual process so it's a smaller investment up front and then on a monthly or quarterly basis you're continually evolving your website so you might learn something new about your funders and it could be the messaging it could be the way they donate it could be the content they're interested in or a resource library that could be evolving if you put all this investment up front on a traditional website and you get that wrong then it's not going to bode well for you and likewise if you're targeting folks in the community that you're serving whether it's the homeless or food insecurity you want to make sure that the messaging you're getting out the user experience is on point and you want to be able to reiterate that so from a growth-driven standpoint it's a content evolving process and the investment is spread out over a much longer time period but you're continually to improve so that's generally the kind of big picture for growth-driven design you know there's a different strategy here but it's kind of like we talked before we'll look at the target audience the website goals we'll do a content audit and a site structure but not on this grand level we'll have ultimately a scope where we want to get to but on the Quick Lights Quick Launch site what can we do to get to market quickly and that's where the Launchpad website comes in so generally what that will include will be a content management system it could be WordPress has one already built in taking a look at the user experience the design, the initial integrations which could be about us what we do donate blogs social media feeds and then maybe a CRM on the back end so if people are filling out forms you're gathering that information hoarding it over to Mailchip or whatever you may be using but getting that Quick Launchpad website launched with the basics but those basics are really powering 80, 90% of what you're trying to do and then continuous improvement so in this case a lot of nonprofits will budget for that continuous improvement we'll look at we'll look at where the traffic's coming in where folks are going are they donating are they volunteering are they engaging in content what's the bounce rate and if we could improve each one of these pieces whether it's a click through from the home page to the donation page or there's a call to action or a form if we can increase maybe it's five steps that folks need to ultimately make a donation they need to understand what you guys do they're reading content they're understanding how they can get involved and if you can increase the conversion rate 5, 10% at these different critical points then doing the math you could literally double your donations double your volunteers double the impact that you're having to your community and it's being able to do this continuous improvement at each little touch point where can you make those iterative improvements and that's really the power of growth-driven design so with that being said you know kind of want to put our money where our mouth is and Kyle will go over some success stories like I said TAP Network is TechSoup's exclusive provider for website services so we'll share some of of our TechSoup members who are also clients Thanks Joe so I'm just going to breeze through a few of these just to kind of show some before and afters you know and how we we made some improvements to these different websites though one of the first ones and you'll see the one on the left or it's the one on the right to showcase the difference in just like look, feel, layout but focus on some of the things that Joe mentioned as we talked about site structures so this was the Down syndrome association of Texas or Central Texas and we started with a a little more traditional I think the site was actually on Squarespace probably used one of like they're built in their pre-built templates followed a very basic navigation structure without a lot of you know opportunity to more easily navigate the website and you can actually see like that was what you see on the left was actually their homepage it was just a picture and a bunch of text great for screen readers but not so great for usability and for user experience we changed that to a more I think visually appealing website with some more engagement opportunities for engagement and a better way to navigate to kind of show like the different programs that are available right on the forefront of their homepage and then how those programs support their community you can see that at the bottom so it shows you know the different the different ways you can have an impact and each one of these has a call to action and a way to navigate to the next step so we went through that kind of content architecture and that user flow we identified like what are the different paths the user take and users take and how do we make sure we can get them on that path as quickly as possible we do this by you know as we mentioned here like organizing the resource the different resources and content into different buckets by audience by category and by type of content so the types could be like downloads blogs events things like that we we brought that those key events and that activity to the homepage and we also made it so it's searchable and sortable by like age and date type event type things like that and then you can easily see how what the benefits are of membership and we created a really user friendly application form for them as well if you visit that site as the example another one was that the one Pulse Academy this is a program that we launched with them called the triangle program which just helped better identify opportunities for educational outreach so we created a templated format for their organization so it made it easy for them to pull in previous programs and upload all this they had a lot of old content but we made we created a template that made it easy to port that over and then emphasize user experience there so if a user was navigating through multiple different programs old programs it was easy for them to find out what the program was what it was about the some of the key highlights which is very different from what they had before where each one was sort of added ad hoc and every one was different so no two were the same it made it harder for users to navigate the site we made that also sortable searchable filterable so it's easy for people to come to the website and find the different programs that are that they're interested in they may be interested in that would resonate with them this was really was grant specific so they were grant funded for this this program so we had to kind of mesh the the grant requirements as well as you know our methodology and our process of that growth driven our methodology as well and this really helped encourage like that future engagement the ability to add events in the future and add programs in the future so they could easily quickly scale from this without having to go back and redesign the site or add a bunch of new functionality to it and then a final one of the final examples that we'll share today is was a company called or an organization called Green Lake Preschool again you can see the comparison between the existing site and the new site left versus right so again just a really templated site a bunch of content on it but no really great way to navigate the site note we weren't they weren't highlighting any of their mission vision values you know there wasn't a lot of what is this organization what do they do and it really did we really didn't think it it showcased like the benefits the power the impact that organization has especially through you know the children the lives that they affect so we redesigned that site we reoriented their content we consolidated they had a lot of content we consolidated that into a few pages because we know we could get someone to where they needed to go quickly and we didn't need to to kind of beat them over the head with the content like the site was doing previously but the other thing nice thing about that is they haven't actually have since launched a few other locations so we put them on a WordPress multi-site platform it allows you to manage multiple you know websites web assets under like one parent organization or parent site and you can quickly launch a new one so I think there's another preschool it's like Woodland preschool and I think they have one more program now as they're trying to expand but now they're easily they're able to quickly launch that next website it's going to have a very similar looking field but they can change things like colors and images throughout throughout them but they're not going it's going to have the same sort of like user engagement path it's going to have the same user interface and that that way they know they've kept it optimized and kept it up to date we integrated a couple of websites or a couple of different separate integrations with their website like loom and Callee and zoom for different like member support so just touching on some of those examples we shared previously of adding integrations after the fact and then one that's a little bit a little more complex this is like a membership driven website called the National Trafficking Shelter Alliance so certainly brochure style and event style pages but they emphasize driving membership so we built on the WordPress platform a member portal that handles the payments and access to members only content you can see public facing you can see the membership directory and then once you join you can see more information about those groups you can actually engage with those groups and then they have membership pricing and they also have tiered event registration and pricing so members get a certain price for events guests get a different price for events and then different levels of membership also get different prices for those events but again still using that same methodology using the same platforms and following those tactics we talked about and I'll turn it back over to Joda to breeze through our service offerings through TechSoup great, thanks Kyle so yes TechSoup has website offerings TapNet work with exclusive provider for website offerings so if you go to TechSoup's home page or any page on TechSoup and you go in the top nav click on services you'll see website services and digital marketing that's us Tap and TechSoup in partnership together so we do website services and the digital marketing so that's one way to get there and just give you a quick overview so like like we said in the beginning you know there's and you guys have you know provided the feedback there's nonprofits can fall into different buckets and when you're first starting out you might be on a Wix space Wix or Squarespace website or doing a lot of the website development yourself we help support those clients we have a website services offering starting I think it's around $500 a month up to a thousand and that's really to provide that ongoing ticket based retainer support so you might be doing your website and that's kind of you know we'll help you out there and then for other nonprofits then on a Wix Squarespace or WordPress and they're ready to make that big jump we have a website development product that starts at $15,000 and we can meet with you and basically have a quick conversation look at your site and generally give you an estimate on the phone it might be $15,000 to relaunch your website you may want a CRM you may need a volunteer management system or a marketing automation such as HubSpot so we'll be able to quickly assess all that and then pull together a scope of work but like I said most websites started around $15,000 and we can work from there but again each each client's different but we can we can work with anyone to really see where you are and hopefully support you anyway that's that's what we have for today we hope that was super helpful open it up for questions and if you could just put them in the chat Colin I'll be glad to do our best I'm not sure if you're able to see the questions in Q&A but Carrie says as a nonprofit supporting a vulnerable community the challenge is being empathetic to the human seeking out care but also having information for potential donors they're too complete audience so we kind of have a dual space just to comment yeah so we see that very frequently you typically one of the better ways to address that is kind of having like a self identification when you come to the website so you say I'm a supporter or I'm someone in need and we want to keep it kind of high level but just enough they can identify themselves down to one of those paths and then we'll typically have a section of the website specific to those different audiences so it could be like for donors for supporters for volunteers or for someone who's in need and then you know working with a number of different organizations we work with like domestic abuse organizations where this is like very important where we have you know resources and things like that available for them but they also want to have the ability to like you know if they're you know unfortunately in an active situation where they're where domestic abuse is prevalent they might need to be able to exit out but no one can see that you know that they they showed up on that they were on that page they were browsing that page so thinking about adding in features and functionality like that that meet that audience and that can you know like I guess appeal to that audience so just breaking up that way so it's you don't get you know you don't want to get the donor you want to take the donor down that path down that path though and make them you know be able to quickly exit the website or pull up a new page if someone was watching them you want to give them the different information it comes back to that content architecture and planning out that user user flow and user experience that's good Dr. Joe says other than Google ad grant are there any other web-based grants that are available to nonprofits that you guys know of not like kind of uniformly available I know that you know obviously through TechSoup we provide our services at a discounted rate and I know that there are other types of grants organizations out there that provide those types of grants that could be through some type of corporate social responsibility grant could be through a partnership with TechSoup where they might you know provide grant funding for a certain percentage of a web project or you know different state level or you know local grants may be available for different organizations I can see that I can see the QA so I don't mind reading them off perfect perfect thank you so somebody asked the best way to dictate image appearance like percentage et cetera for mobile that's there's not a one size fits all answer to that because it depends on what you're using the image for whether it's like an icon that's just supposed to be like a you know type of abstract thing that just shows that this is where you do something or if it's like you know an image that's showcasing like a featured image for like a blog post or a news article or to show impact it's more about the size it's about the size of the image and making sure it renders on different devices so if you you know if you take your cell phone and you and you use that upload that to your website often those pictures are going to be really big way too big way bigger than you would need for a desktop browser for sure and definitely for a mobile device and they're going to be really large in size so if you think about putting three or four there's on one page it's going to take longer for that page to load it's also probably not going to render correctly so it's just you know make sure that's they are optimized for the different devices that also optimized for all devices so think you know aspect ratio and size of the image if it takes longer for your page to load Google is going to penalize you and push you down further in search results you might alienate someone who's trying to visit your site and they're seeing that your site's loading very slowly and often that's because there's too many too large files or too large pictures on there if you're using something like WordPress there's a number of different tools that are available or plugins that will call like smush the images browsers or different size devices and then no other like Wix and Squarespace and things like that also have similar features that are built in but I would start without those crazy size images someone else says I'm interested I need to build a case for my trustees to pass the large percentage of our budget what research is happening out there on doubling donation conversions with streamlining again I'll probably say this a bunch of times but there's also not a one size fits all a lot goes into that like where are you getting these donors where are you getting this audience from is it the right audience are they resonating with your messaging the website itself full transparency is not going to be like the silver bullet that solves that problem updating the user experience updating the user interface putting more content specific to where their donation goes and showing the impact that they could have working on a marketing program an automation program to drive someone back to your site or try to enhance or increase their donations are all going to go into how to get more how to get more donations out of that we just we want to also we often try to think of that like it isn't a single direction or why why websites being built because someone's question earlier on there's often multiple audiences so yes it might be important to drive donations out of this you're probably less likely to get a donation from your website than you are to get someone to your website who later donates because they found you on the website on the web right so they might come to your website and see that you have an event come to attend the event and then buy raffle tickets or bid on as part of a silent auction or you know donate at the event so the website was still kind of that front door that initial piece that got them in there or that converted them and then it later became a donor it also might be the entry point for the community you serve so especially during COVID but it's always been important but more importantly we saw this happen during COVID a number of non-profit organizations that serve people through brick and mortar locations were now not able to reach to talk to their audience to engage with their audience to serve that audience and the website was kind of like like an aha moment for a lot of people but websites where they could have been doing that all along so we worked with you know boys and girls clubs and things of that nature to take typically offline engagement offline materials and bring them online and create a space or safe space for their audience to engage with them so they could look up curriculums or they could have some activities they could do at home they could engage with you know other you know other audiences and things like that so I would think of think of your audience as more than just just that one dimensional thing some more like best security use consider on our WordPress website when using third party plugins same thing there like there's a number of different options out there it really depends what you're doing what you're collecting the host is going to be one of the most important decisions you make who's hosted with where that where their servers are where that infrastructure is what kind of backups what kind of security what kind of security they have in place and then there's there's certainly you know plugins that are available like word word fans or security that are that will add layers of security and then the public public site itself is structured built coded up is going to be important too someone asked what to consider when choosing a membership management plugin for member login or password protected purposes it's really just you know what's important features and functionality wise and make sure that you're selecting a plugin or a tool that accomplishes that and then also again looking to the future so we often get requests from people who have some type of member or member login but it doesn't do all the things that they now needed to do so you know giving them the ability to download save content like content upload content whatever it might be so be sure that like where where you are now is also you're also planning for where you'd like to eventually go but you know kind of balance that between not biting off more than you can choose you know it's not going to be overkill somebody asked are there any metrics on linking to websites of sponsors or donors from a nonprofit website like number of clicks do people respond positively negatively I don't have that information off hand I know I'm sure there are you know benchmark studies case studies and things of that nature again it's probably going to be like sort of like industry specific even within the nonprofit space best practice for bilingual website certainly to localize them as much as possible so you know having content that is written you know in the really with the same sort of tone and style that would be in that localized audience so that you obviously I'll just pick Spanish like Spanish in the United States different Spanish in Mexico then spoken Spanish in Mexico different spoken Spanish in Spain so you know localizing that for those different audiences certain platforms certainly WordPress things like HubSpot will allow you to better do that and it will differentiate like what what version of the site or which language shows in those different audiences or for those different browsers there's also some great you know plugins tools things like that that will translate sites for you as well so if it's you know not if you're not going to translate every word it will do sort of like a machine translation one thing it's important to note with that is being sure that you're using text wherever you can and not putting text on an image and uploading that that image of the text on it on your website because if that image has you know English text over top of it it's supposed to be translated to Spanish you're going to miss part of that audience are there any in-website tools to help optimize images I can there's certainly some WordPress there's like there's one called ImagineFi I think there's E-W-W image optimizer a lot of the caching plugins will have image optimizers in there as well so many asked is there any way to tell if a plugin is still being used we have many of them installed in our WordPress site and it's hard to tell if they're currently being used on the back end we would like to remove the inactive ones to speed up our site tools that will allow you to do this and certainly just one of the better ways to do something like that would be to create like a development version or staging version and then testing the different plugins that you suspect that are not being used and looking for that feature or functionality that's part of that because even those plugins aren't going to catch aren't going to find every sort of like remnant of something that's being used across that site someone asked how often should I update websites there's no right answer to that it's keeping Google the search engines you know seeing this more with AI as well they're going to want you to keep it keep it updated as frequently as possible but it's got to be relevant so not just not just going on every day and adding like a few words or something like that or a new image but making sure it's kind of kept up to date so you know especially if you're doing things like like seasonal promotions or things like that you don't want someone to get there come there in June they still have something up about Thanksgiving from last year or like you know fall photos or things like that up there so keeping that stuff up to date and then as far as thinking through like the actual core structural updates and design updates that's subjective to the organization as it's needed but you know kind of always keeping in mind that the website the platform should be patched and up to date so that you're not you know vulnerable to security threats and then being sure that you're following best practices whether that's like ADA or WCAG guidelines for accessibility or if it's just general best practices for building websites to kind of keep you at the forefront so you know it looks like something's fresh and someone's like oh there's something's changed since last time I come here you know I'm interested in learning more and I think we got we got about one minute left we got about great kind of depth from you all today as Aretha said we will be sharing this slide deck and the recording you'll probably see this later today or tomorrow and within that you'll see there's an option to get like a consultation from us or from our team if you just click that button that'll be on that second to last slide for web services it'll come right to us and then you can just kind of tell us like some of the the struggles or the concerns or the questions that we're going to call with you all thanks everybody