Summary
Before jumping into fonts and layouts, nonprofits should align internally on their mission, audience, and future direction. The most successful website projects involve:
- Deep discussions about purpose and user priorities
- A vision for where the organization wants to be in 3 years
- A willingness to cut outdated or low-value content
- Skipping the traditional RFP in favor of expert-led discovery
- Consistent meetings to build clarity and consensus
- Clear expectations about the depth and goals of the engagement
A website redesign is more than a visual refresh—it’s a strategic opportunity to clarify, simplify, and grow.
118Group’s Website Redesign Readiness Framework
Over the years, we’ve worked with more than 100 nonprofits on website projects. Some go smoothly. Some hit snags.
That’s why we’ve developed the 118Group Nonprofit Website Readiness Framework—a simple but powerful lens to help organizations prepare for successful web projects. The framework centers around six essential questions every team should align on before kicking off a redesign:
- What do we do—and for whom?
- Where do we want to be in 3 years?
- What are we ready to get rid of?
- Are we ready to meet and collaborate regularly?
- Do we know what kind of partnership we want?
- Are we open to skipping the RFP and starting with discovery?
Start with Strategy, Not Style
Many of our nonprofit clients starting new projects with 118Group are often surprised by how little we discuss things like fonts, images, and colors, at least at first.
We often don’t talk about color until 4-6 weeks into the project, after several intense weekly, 90-minute workshops with our clients.
That’s because a website project goes (or at least should) much deeper than some of the surface-level decisions many nonprofits think they’ll be making.
Strategy should always come before style.
Align Internally on Mission and Audience
Who are the target audiences for your website, and which are most important?
This seems like a painfully simple question, but gather 4-6 decision-makers from your nonprofit into a meeting, ask this question, and you’ll find that everyone has a different answer.
How can this be?
Because your nonprofit serves many different groups of people. Even the most laser-focused organizations have different initiatives and programs aimed at various user groups.
And that is the challenge – prioritization.
We recently grappled with this during conversations with an organization focused on driving sustainable lifestyle changes amongst its audience. Some in the organization wanted to be an encyclopedia for green living, while others wanted to focus more on changes directly relevant to the locality in which the nonprofit operates.
These are fundamental differences of opinion that arose due to the website project. Be ready to grapple with these types of disagreements in vision when in the early stages of a website project.
Use Your Website to Support Future Vision
A website should evolve with your nonprofit. That being said, if you’re going to invest months of energy and thousands of dollars into a new one, you should do your best to ensure it matches the vision your organization has for its future, at least roughly.
Ask yourself the following question:
“What will our organization look like in 3 years”?
When we ask this question to clients during projects, we’re often met with a dozen different answers. It’s a question that sparks a lot of healthy debate within organizations, as it should.
One of the unexpected benefits of working with a good partner for your organization’s new website is that they ask questions that force decision-makers to grapple with the future and develop consensus around what direction they are heading in.
Declutter Your Content Before You Redesign
Pruning is one of the most critical parts of a website redesign. Nonprofits tend to accumulate a ton of information and content over the lifecyle of a website and this content sprawl starts looking a bit like the inside of a hoarders closet.
Our job during the project is to come in and be the Marie Kondo of digital clutter. Often this makes us the bad guy, as everyone is emotionally invested in various parts of the website or various pieces of content.
This is also what makes this challenging for nonprofits internally. Everyone is happy pruning content – until it’s the content that they’re interested in.
But strategy is about deciding what not to do, and so a content strategy for your website is about deciding what not to include.
Skip the RFP – Talk to Experts Instead
For many nonprofits, the first step when for getting a website redesign project underway is to draft and send out an RFP.
This is an outdated process that results in worse outcomes.
Whenever we receive an RFP from a nonprofit, it always includes the same vague goals and buzzwords.
“Intuitive navigation”
“Frictionless donor experience”
“Modern design”
It is impossible to build an accurate budget around most of the RFP’s organizations put together for their websites.
Why is that?
Because a proposal is a plan, and plans require expertise.
Consider the construction industry; before a builder can provide a proposal for your project, they need to know what they are building. Often, they will either recommend an architect or will have one in-house to work through the details of the build ahead of anyone breaking ground.
Think of a proposal as the blueprint for the project, much like an architect would provide to builders ahead of a project.
To accurately create a blueprint for the project, you need to dedicate significant time to understanding the project’s goals. When you send an RFP into space and await responses, often these proposals have minimal definition.
Any definition they do have is likely just theories of what your nonprofit needs, given that there has likely been little discussion regarding your nonprofit’s actual goals.
So, skip the RFP and instead focus on having real conversations with experts. Many will offer smaller projects to help you bring definition to the project ahead of a full agreement.
Plan for Weekly Meetings
Today, it’s in vogue to hate meetings.
“This meeting could have been an email” just about sums up most people’s reaction to poorly run meetings.
The truth – meetings are as useful as you make them. At 118Group, we need to meet with our clients. Just imagine hashing out all of the above-mentioned questions back and forth on an email chain.
Nightmare.
Meetings provide people with an opportunity to disagree, discuss, and then converge, which is crucial when addressing fundamental issues that often spark significant disagreement.
In the early days of a project, we try and meet with our clients for at least 60 minutes a week. These meetings involve a lot of back-and-forth discussion, where we typically serve as moderator & facilitator of important discussions between internal stakeholders with varying opinions.
Often the trickiest part of the project is coordinating a meeting time with all of the various stakeholders – but it is so worth it.
The insights and conversations generated when you get the right people on a call are total gold.
Before starting a project, ensure that you and your colleagues have the necessary bandwidth to meet weekly with your website team.
Align Expectations Before You Commit
Poorly aligned expectations are a huge source of frustration and dissatisfaction in projects between clients and partners. Key to a successful project is ensuring that your expectations align with the firm you are working with, for example:
- are you looking for a quick, surface-level solution that meets a minimum requirement level?
- are you looking for a deeper engagement that addresses more fundamental issues and opportunities?
Before you get into an engagement, ensure that your expectations for the project align with the type of work your selected partners do.