A Comprehensive Guide To Nonprofit Website Redesign: Practices & Tips

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15 Dec, 2023

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Are you satisfied with your online presence? Is your visibility enough as a nonprofit organization? Are you failing to engage supporters and facilitate donations? Then, you might be failing to communicate your mission, goals, and impact effectively through your website. Or, maybe as a social service organization, your nonprofit website is no longer able to reach its full potential. It might be outdated and not included in the list of the best nonprofit websites. So, it's time for you to embrace nonprofit website redesign services from a reliable UI/UX partner and serve your purpose.

Certainly, as a nonprofit organization, you want people accessing your website to act and understand your social purpose. Getting donations and required funding is one aspect of your existing website. The major purpose is to let users understand your cause and the website communicates that clearly and effortlessly.

Unfortunately, several nonprofit companies believe a general website is good enough to capture users' attention. Well, it's a thing of the past now. At present, it is essential to convince users to stay engaged and contribute significantly. Therefore, there is no point in limping with that old and traditionally designed website.

As a nonprofit website management and maintenance expert, we have created this comprehensive guide to website redesign for nonprofit. With the help of this blog, you will acquire glimpses of why a nonprofit should redesign a website, the crucial redesigning stages, common challenges, and ways to solve them.

Optimize Now: Nonprofit Website Redesign Guide!

  • Enhanced User Engagement
  • Increased Donor Trust:
  • Improved Fundraising Success
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Why Nonprofit Website Redesign Is Important?

Change is often necessary to go with the trend. Especially in the competitive digital scenario, when numerous nonprofit organizations like yours reach the general public for help. This is where you need to stand unique and attractive. 

Just like technology evolves over a period of time, outdated nonprofit website design fails to capture users' attention. Time demands change, which is content. You can look into the following signs to better understand the importance of revamping the non-profit website design or going for your nonprofit website redesign.

Time to revamp your nonprofit website

1. It\'s not mobile-friendly

You must be well aware of Google's updated algorithm that says the majority of users prefer to access a site that is mobile-friendly. In fact, 60% of consumers are more likely to access the mobile version of a website to access information or any service. With that being said nonprofit websites that are not mobile-friendly experience low user traffic.

In the nonprofit, when your ultimate motive is to engage, capture users' attention, convince them to donate, or even volunteer with you, It is paramount to showcase the right set of information as per the user's preferred device and screen. Therefore, as part of website maintenance for nonprofits, redesigning and making it mobile responsive become crucial to stand out from others.

2. Outdated & Gives More of a 2000s Feel

As per web credibility, more than 75% of website visitors judge a business website based on its attractive design elements. In case, you are still stuck with basic non profit web design elements, then you will get nothing, except that, 'thank you', from visitors. And, that's just because of serving a good cause. However, the real purpose does not get solved because people fail to donate or volunteer.

An updated nonprofit website has a brighter chance of creating an intuitive user experience. It helps connect with the general public and allows them to stay in touch with you. Thus, if the current list of donors and volunteers keeps getting narrowed down, then traditional look and feel could be the reason.

If you're still in a dilemma about the existing nonprofit website design, then check out these examples to get more ideas.

3. A compelling Storyline is Missing

Undoubtedly, your nonprofit website is the central hub of marketing and a tool for you to spread the cause you are supporting. It certainly features a message with proofs that connect with users and compel them to take necessary action. Unfortunately, you're not serving the purpose clearly.

The reason behind this could be an outdated or weak storyline with not-so-engaging website graphics and visual elements. As a result, a storyline that hardly creates an impact fails to acquire engagement and build connection. Hence, your target users fail to stick to the site.

Well, the solution is the strategic placement of content, images, videos, and CTA buttons. Fulfill the objective with the help of a reliable website designer for nonprofit website redesign accordingly for a great nonprofit website.

4. Visitors no longer spend more time on-site

Now, what can be the possible reason for this? Simply put, your nonprofit website is experiencing a high bounce rate. A fancy term with a not-so-fancy outcome! It is possible that users are visiting your platform, but not spending enough time or grabbing the required information. May the purpose of your site is not clear. Or, designs are not at par according to the target audience. Therefore, it is relevant to re-evaluate your website's design and revamp it as part of nonprofit website maintenance plans.

Begin by first finalizing your goals, whether to spread social awareness, get more fundraising, and donations, or adding more volunteers. Depending on the same, start a website nonprofit redesign and add relevant content while encouraging visitors to stay on your site.

Start working on the compiled list of strategies with the help of a reliable site design partner

The 6 Stages Of An Effective Nonprofit Website Project

An effective nonprofit website compels donors and volunteers to take action. However, to make sure it happens, carefully execute the strategic process of nonprofit website design stages. You can use this as a guide to create an appealing nonprofit website 

The 6 Stages Of An Effective Nonprofit Website Project

1. Discovery

In the first stage of nonprofit website redesigning, an experienced design team will first understand your goals & objectives to identify new growth opportunities. 

  • The first step lies in identifying the objective of your non-profit website and accordingly suggesting designs. 
  • Keep your target audience in mind after understanding their persona through data derived from Google Analytics. 
  • Evaluating content to check which information is getting more or less traction in coordination with existing design elements. 
  • A full website audit from the design perspective is performed to identify inconsistencies, more whitespace, and other loopholes.
  • Perform an SEO audit to know your nonprofit website’s traffic, navigational flow, page loading speed, bounce rate, etc.

2. Strategy

Once the discovery stage is complete, the design team will move toward strategy creation.

  • Strategizing the type of content, length, flow, and visual representation to capture more and more user’s attention. 
  • Revisiting the sitemap to check relevant content and suggest specific changes per the new design strategy. 
  • Considering all stages of user engagement and suggesting necessary content changes allows visitors to return to your website. 
  • Creating information architecture in line with new design elements before making specific changes.

3. UX & design

Next, you move into the website redesigning phase while keeping user experience in mind and working on the following few steps.

  • Creating prototypes or wireframes in this stage, and that too as per the UX level of design. 
  • Adding necessary elements to the wireframes to provide first glimpses of the new website’s design. 
  • Recommending a new visual approach to nonprofit websites and taking your feedback to perform required changes. 
  • After approval, all the visual changes are applied to your website. 

4. Implementation

In this stage, final development takes place with the help of expert designers and developers.

  • All the design requirements, finalized content, and specifications are integrated together to redesign website pages. 
  • Experts use advanced development platforms to speed up the redesigning and creation process.
  • Suggesting new themes meeting your nonprofit website’s approach and implementing the same

5. Quality assurance testing

Quality assurance is an important aspect to identify inaccuracies in new design elements and fixing things up. 

  • A professional QA expert is assigned to perform end-to-end UI and UX testing of your website. 
  • Collecting design faults and suggesting necessary changes. 
  • Implementing all the required changes to maintain accuracy and consistency. 
  • Take a final snapshot of your nonprofit website’s design and provide a signoff after completion. 

6. Accessibility

It is essential that your nonprofit website is accessible across multiple devices and caters to the requirements of a diverse audience. 

  • Checking the accessibility of your website across devices.
  • Suggesting changes to make your site accessible to normal and visually impaired individuals.
  • Make your site more reader- and user-friendly.

You need to follow these steps to build an effective and compelling nonprofit website. But that would definitely not solve all the challenges. Nevertheless, having a clear and detailed knowledge of the challenges might help in resolving them. So let’s now delve into the next section about challenges. 

Common Nonprofit Website Challenges

The road of web design for nonprofit might not appear simple at first. Certainly, as a nonprofit organization, you may face some challenges and need to find ways to resolve them. Here are three of the common non-profit website redesign challenges that you must know about.

1. Catering to a diverse set of target audience

Like any other business that features different target audience, spread across wide demographics, even nonprofit has a wide customer base. For instance, you need to target people interested in making donations and allow you to continue with the social cause and help humankind. You even target individuals who like to volunteer for nonprofit activities and become active participants in your cause.

Typically, establishing relationships with different sets of customers with a simple and outdated design is next to impossible. Nonprofits with basic website designs find it challenging to meet the requirements of different user bases and further fail to meet the social cause.

2. Taking an action-oriented approach

Nonprofits work for a good cause and rely on some action from the sides of volunteers, donors, fundraisers, and more. As a nonprofit organization, you want people to respond to your messages while demanding some monetary or community assistance. In this way, inspiring action is the ultimate goal of a nonprofit website.

Convincing users to take action on your social cause is not that simple. It's cumbersome to make people devote their time, money, and efforts to the cause reflected on your website. Maybe the action-oriented messaging on your website is unclear or less impactful and people fail to understand the cause.

3. Offering consistent messaging

Creating consistent visual messaging on the website is challenging for nonprofits. This is because different target audiences require distinctive messaging. A single-flow website design can only cater to the requirements of a single-line customer base. Thus, nonprofits find it problematic to create a similar design flow and capture the attention of both donors and volunteers.

Nonprofit website challenges and solutions

How Nonprofit Website Redesign Can Help Solve These Challenges?

Here, we have reliable solutions to the above-mentioned nonprofit website design challenges.

  • Add dynamic content with integrations

To attain a nonprofit website's user diversity, add a dynamic landing page and cater to a different spectrum of users. For example, create a customized landing page for donors with respective CTA buttons to easily donate. Similarly, a volunteer page on your nonprofit website must be designed with social activities in action-oriented images and videos.

Even integrating different tools can help in understanding the needs of different users. With the content management tools, keep track of the messaging, understand user's responses, and provide timely replies to meet widespread requirements.

  • Bring easy-to-understand content

Allow different users to perform specific actions on your nonprofit website through simple content publication and its variety. For instance, persuade donors with the help of real-time incidents & activities videos, testimonials, pictures, and more. Doing this will allow you to capture user's attention and compel them to perform a particular action.

On the other side, ensure a seamless volunteer registration process with an easy-to-understand form. Allow interested volunteers to become active participants in your nonprofit organization and help the cause.

  • Rely on web design assistance

Overcome the challenge of delivering required messaging to the target users with the professional assistance of websites for nonprofits design services. The UI/UX experts belonging to a reliable company will help you create user-friendly design elements meeting nonprofit objectives. The experts will assist you in creating customized and attention-grabbing designs for different landing pages with specially designed CTA buttons.

FAQs

1. What are all things included in nonprofit website redesigning?

Some of the essential things included in redesigning a nonprofit website include the following:

  • Adding contrasting visuals, high-quality images, and videos.
  • Adding strong visual elements, mainly CTA buttons.
  • Creating a blog section and different layouts of landing pages.
  • Optimizing the site's SEO for better ranking.

2. How to know when a nonprofit website needs redesigning?

      Here's the list of signs that allow you to realize redesigning a nonprofit website.

      • Decreasing numbers of users and subscribers.
      • High bounce rate.
      • Slow page loading speed.
      • Not so a mobile-friendly website.
      • The design no longer matches with the brand.
      • Outdated content is there on the site.
      • Difficult for users to navigate the site.

      3. How long does it take to redesign a website?

        It usually depends on the design requirements. More customizations require more time in redesigning a nonprofit website.

        4. What would be the cost of a nonprofit website redesign?

        The cost of redesigning a nonprofit website depends on the requirement. Concerning the same, we first understand your needs and objectives before deciding on the budget and share the information with you.  

        Final Words

        Redesigning your nonprofit site can rejuvinate life into your business again. This will enable you to pass across a meaningful message, use a user-friendly design, and attract more members as well as donations. Remember, when redesigning a site, carefully decide on the right professional partner and prepare. Team up with Janbask's website designing services for designing, redesigning, and website maintenance services for nonprofits equipped with the tools, functions, and platform that puts you in the driving position for success. We don’t need to control your entry point onto your foundation’s website – we will happily give it to you so you feel free to command it like a pro, while we cheer you on from behind.

        For a better understanding of this, you can schedule a quick and free demo with one of our nonprofit experts. That could mean that a new website is in order without needing to be scary, costly, and overwhelming. It would rather release you for what results you want. 

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