Resources

User Research for Nonprofit Websites

We don’t do nearly enough audience research in the nonprofit world. After years as a professional user researcher, and another 20+ years applying this background to my nonprofits clients, I can say with confidence: unless you’re doing it, it’s almost certainly easier than you think. This collection of articles will get you started.

Building a Habit of Tiny Website User Studies
Every nonprofit should be trying to do more website 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.

Nonprofit Website User Interviews… on a Shoestring
User interviews are one of my favorite research techniques when money is tight. It’s amazing how much you learn from talking to four or five actual people. Here’s tips and techniques for getting the most of your “research budget”... even when you don’t have any budget at all.

Five Ways to Find Professional Staff for Research
If you're looking to do interviews or user testing with a target audience of business or nonprofit professionals, this can be a somewhat tricky audience to find. It gets more difficult the more specific and higher level staff you're looking for. But having done a few of these projects recently, I suggest five different ways that might work for you.

Why I Don’t (Usually) Use Audience Surveys
I’m a big fan of user research. But I don't like to use audience surveys much. In this quick article, I talk about why that is, and about website intercept surveys, the one kind I do like to use.