Resources

Designing Nonprofit Websites and Roadmaps

When you’re designing a new website, you need to pull together your stakeholders, balance time and money with both your organization’s and your visitor’s goals to define the strategy, structure, and vision. It’s not an easy process. But after working with nonprofits on these types of projects for more than twenty years, I have some processes and ways to think that can help.

Using Engagement Pyramids to Define Nonprofit Websites
When you're creating a vision or roadmap of a website, it can be tricky to balance your organization's goals with your audiences goals. I’ve found that an Engagement Pyramid can be really helpful in thinking through the right way to support both. Here’s an example of how it can work.

Digital Cardsorting to Determine Nonprofit Website Priorities
Are you looking for a way to determine priorities among a lot of different stakeholders? I used cardsorting, more typically used as a user research technique, with a lot of success with the Learning Policy Institute. It helped us figure out where to start addressing a complex list of possible priorities and the need to get buy-in from more than a dozen stakeholders.

Creating a Shared Technology Project Vision
Your nonprofit is taking on a new technology project. What should you nail down at the beginning to avoid expensive rework— and how do you get buy-in on that? In this article, I walk through my typical “quick and dirty” process to create a shared vision with your stakeholders, plus a set of tips for more complex projects that need additional work to reach consensus

"Minimal Viable Products" in the Nonprofit Tech World
Creating a "MVP" or Minimal Viable Product means launching your technology project with as few features and complications as possible. The concept was created with a corporate product mindset. Does it apply to the nonprofit tech world as well? (Spoiler alert: it does).

Website Tradeoffs: Balancing Time, Money, Scope + Polish
When you're planning a website, you need to find the right mix of three things: the staff time you spend, money, and the scope of your site. And then there’s a four element— polish— that needs to be considered as well. In this article, I take a closer look at how to balance these four things for success.

Eight Underused Technology Roadmap Tactics
In the nonprofit sector, we tend to overlook many useful planning methodologies, especially ones that have come out of the corporate sector. Here’s some techniques that I’ve used or run across that may be useful as you plan your next technology project.

Finding Technology Funders Part 1 and Part 2 (TechSoup)
In this two-part video series on the TechSoup blog, I first explain how nonprofit can find funding sources willing to support funding projects and infrastructure. In the second part, I talk through what to include in a grant proposal that will win the dollars you need.