Using Engagement Pyramids to Define Nonprofit Websites

When you're creating a vision or roadmap of a website for your nonprofit, it can be tricky to balance your organization's goals with your audiences goals. Creating an Engagement Pyramid can be really helpful in thinking through the right way to support both.

For instance, marketing teams often define their goals in terms of conversion: to convert a visitor to an eNews subscriber, for instance, or to a donor. But no site visitor ever showed up with the goal to "convert". They want information, or to make a difference, or to find something in particular. Your website need to bridge that gap.

About Engagement Pyramids

An Engagement Pyramid maps out how you’ll provide value to your audience and, step by step, deeper your relationship with them until they take the types of actions that meet your goals. A pyramid is a common model to map engagement, but there are lots of others— for instance, an Engagement Ladder is conceptually the same as a pyramid, with visitors entering on the bottom. An Engagement Funnel is another common view, which is really the same thing but upside down.

An Example

Here's a Engagement Pyramid I created for a client, changed up a bit to anonymize it. As you can see, it doesn't have to be beautiful. We actually started calling this one the "engagement trapezoid" due to the missing top... the organization had a substantial amount of advocacy participants with another website and an entire internal team to support them, so I was making the point (no pun intended) that the website we were working on didn't need to support the people at the top of the pyramid.

The bottom has the things you're offering that are of value to your user, but require little effort on their part. This is often articles, or things that provide a little more detail behind a social media post, or a quick video.

On the next level up, you provide opportunities for a bit more engagement with your organization— for instance, signing up for your eNews, following you on social, or registering for a somewhat longer video. These aren't a big jump for the visitor from the first level... but also, not coincidentally, probably allow your organization to reach out to them more systematically over time.

And so on, up the pyramid until you have defined a way for visitors to climb gradually, getting additional value at each step. Each step encourages them to take another, until they arrive at the actions that will fulfill your organizations goals.

Using It To Inform Your Website

How do you use this to guide a website? In general, a lot of your website should be devoted to the things that are on the bottom level of the pyramid, and trying to move them up to the second level. These things should be front and center. As visitors become more engaged, and thus higher in the pyramid, they're (by definition) more likely to be motivated to look for what they need. It might well still make sense to support them on your website, but there’s less bang-for-the-buck in making them immediately obvious as one of the first things on your site.

If your team is actually on the same page, it’s a fairly quick process to build out a pyramid, get buy in and move on. If this takes more discussion and time… well, it’s important to spend that time up front so you don’t spend way more time trying to repair your project down the road.