The Nonprofit Website Insider

Tiny user research, ChatGPT tone, transparency, better narratives, fewer PDFs, and how to prioritize all the great ideas that will result.

Welcome to the third issue of the Nonprofit Website Insider. We’ve just passed the 250 subscribers mark, which is really exciting to me. It’s a privilege for me to justify keeping up on a ton of industry and website news, and finding the best overviews of key topics. I loved this side of my work back when I was the Executive Director of Idealware, so it’s great to be able to pick it up again.

For those just joining us, the Website Insider is a twice-monthly newsletter of curated articles, insights, and case studies for nonprofit staff who manage websites. Whether you have a huge communications team or are the sole staff member of the organization, each email contains something for you to learn.

This issue focuses on ways to build good website habits: more user research, transparency and well crafted narratives; fewer PDFs; designing mobile-first to better work on desktop; and how to prioritize all the great ideas that might result.

Enjoy!

Laura


Building a Habit of Tiny User Studies (Laura S. Quinn Consulting)
We should all be trying to do more user research, and there are a lot of options that give you a ton of good information with comparatively little time investment. How little time? In this article, I walk through seven different miniature user studies you can do in less than eight hours. Build a research habit over time by starting small. 

Crafting an AI Persona for ChatGPT to Get Better Responses (DiviEngine)
If you’ve been experimenting with ChatGPT or Claude to refine articles or blog posts, you know that trying to get the tool to write in a reasonable tone can be a big challenge. It can help to prompt it to write based on a persona - including who they’re used to writing for, what they care about, what voice they use, what websites they’re inspired by, perhaps what they avoid doing, and even their own backstory.

Usability and Accessibility Issues with PDFs (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
We had a great conversation on LinkedIN about warning web visitors if you’re linking them to a PDF (PDFs can be a jarring experience, slow to load, inaccessible, and largely unusable on mobile). But really, this is a bigger conversation about trying to reduce the number of PDFs that you rely on. There’s a bunch of usability and accessibility issues with the best PDFs. This article provides a good overview (perhaps for you to use to convince your colleagues!). 

RICE: Simple prioritization for product managers (Intercom)
As website managers, we often need to prioritize features or requests, sometimes among a number of stakeholders. Having a quantitative(ish) way to do that can be helpful both in your own team and to sell your decisions to others. This article (which came to me via Lauren Pope’s great 10 Things newsletter) walks through one method. 

The Negative Impact of Poor Mobile-First Web Design on Desktop (Nielsen Norman Group)
When you do a mobile first website, you need to design the desktop version thoughtfully or you can easily create a page that has too much white space and too many big images. The Neilsen Norman Group did a hard-core research study with these kind of pages - those with too much "content dispersion" - and found that the problem causes significant usability implications on desktop. Of course, the answer isn't to avoid a mobile first site, but instead to ensure a design that scales up gracefully and effectively on desktop.

Mapping your Narrative Landscape (Narrative Initiative)
How do you go about defining the right narrative for your project, initiative, or organization? It’s all too easy to define your language and story using a frame created by people you don't agree with. The Narrative Initiative provides a detailed guide to how you might start: by mapping the language. The in-depth guide begins with a summary, and then a detailed case study, and templates, and tools -- wow! 

How to Improve Your Transparency for Donors (DonorBox)
It’s thirteen days until Giving Tuesday! But it might not be too late to make some straightforward updates to your website — perhaps to add some information to boost donor confidence. This article runs down eight steps to improve your transparency, including potentially straightforward additions like posting financial statements, prominently displaying ratings (like Charity Navigator or Guidestar), showing staff and board photos, and more.