The Nonprofit Website Insider

A template to help you choose which website tasks to tackle first, plus a guide for making smart project choices

Hi website champions,

Let’s say you're staring at a list of 20 tasks. Some are important but time-consuming, others are quick wins that would still make a difference. How do you choose what to focus on now? A "must-have" task that takes three weeks might actually be less valuable to take on right now than three "should-have" tasks you could knock out in a day each. Making these trade-offs in your head quickly gets overwhelming.

To take the guesswork out of these decisions, I created a template you can download (it's free with registration) that helps calculate a Value Score for each task. This tells you the "bang for your buck" for each item: The lower the score, the better the return on your time investment. Simply input each task's priority and estimated size (see my Project Scoping Guide for refreshers on smart prioritization and realistic estimating), and the template helps you identify your quickest wins.

Here's a practical example: Let's say you’ve hired a writer for 40 hours to improve your website's content. You list out all potential updates and assign each one a priority and size estimate. The template then calculates a Value Score for each task. When you sort them by score, you might discover that updating five small but important pages actually delivers more value than completely overhauling one large section. The template also keeps a running total of project hours, so you can easily see what fits within your 40-hour budget.

A few important notes about using this approach:

• It works best for small projects—think one person's time, maybe two. This isn't meant for large team projects where coordination time becomes a major factor. If you've ever heard of the “Mythical Man-Month", it's the same principle—some things just don't scale linearly with more people.

• This template is particularly useful for consistent types of work, like content updates or bug fixes. If you have a content audit showing which pages need work, or a backlog of website enhancements, this method helps identify where to focus first.

• Finally, remember: the spreadsheet is a tool, not your boss! Use your judgment to adjust the results. Sometimes tasks that appear unrelated in the spreadsheet actually make more sense to tackle together. For instance, if three "About Us" pages need updates, it might be more efficient to handle them as a group even if they don't score consecutively.

Use this template, combined with smart prioritization and realistic estimating, and you'll have a practical roadmap for your project that maximizes impact while respecting your resources. I put together a guide to show how all these pieces fit together, if you'd like to see everything in one place.

Here’s to smart choices,

Laura