We’ve been through a lot together. We’ve listened, designed, written, pitched. We lost sleep with you, and celebrated that first big victory. Now, let us help you launch.
Whether it’s a new logo, a new building, or a new newsletter. Launching any of these things takes time and has to be intentional. Let’s make sure you’re not leaving anyone or anything, out.
Moving my way through the non-profit world over the last 20+ years has really opened my eyes to something. Technology, in most non-profits, is sacrificed for the work of the mission. For many, the choice of buying a program participant a bus ticket to safety takes precedence over that lap-top we know we need. Being able to pay for another week’s worth of food for the shelter is more valuable than upgrading our Windows software. We’re building our websites for free on software like Wix and Weebly because we really just want to have a presence, but are we really considering the impact of that on clients, donors, and most importantly, on the image we are creating for the community we serve?
But what does having a web presence mean? And what really is the harm in not updating our hardware and software? Well, let’s unpack these things and how they relate to our work, our missions, and the people and communities we serve.
Websites
Non-Profit websites have spent years playing catch up to the for-profit world. Relying heavily on free, or nearly free website design sites like Wix, Weebly and others. Not that there is anything wrong with using those sites, they certainly have their place in the sector. But as non-profits, what exactly are we leaving on the table by not designing EXACTLY what we need. Well, I’ll tell you. We are walking away from:
Having a website that is not optimized for today’s user means we are also leaving on the table the future of our missions. Okay, well maybe it’s not that drastic, but when we neglect to take into consideration that as our society’s demographics are changing, so are their demands for how our websites perform. We now need them to be mobile friendly, incredibly fast, and easy to navigate. Millennials (and younger) want to be able to find things quickly, they want to donate with a text, and they want to be able to share your content, their donation and your information in a few taps on their phone. Getting here, to this magical place of optimization, delightful user interfaces and fast loading mobile sites can feel overwhelming and over budget. But if you have clear goals, a set of audience priorities and stand behind the mission of your organization it can happen (on time and under budget).
So, what about that hardware and software?
We have to stop starving ourselves. Non-profit Executive Directors, frontline staff, and volunteers all deserve a good chair! and a computer that works! and software that was released in the same decade we are working in! Don’t let yourself believe anything different (don’t do it!) Let’s take a stroll back in time.. to a time when you were in school, doing that 20 page history paper in your college computer lab. Everyone used the same computers, inserting disks, saving, printing, taking their disk and leaving. Hell, we even had to format our own disks before we could use them! Do you remember that feeling when your disk corrupted and you couldn’t get ANY of your work? Do you remember last year when your hard drive crashed in the middle of your annual appeal? Or that time when your computer was SO SLOW that the donor who wanted some 990 information couldn’t get it? How about that virus? Did you lose control of any donor or participant data? I’ll wait while you think of the million other things that go wrong with our computers when we turn them on.
It’s hard to tell ourselves we deserve nice things, but we do AND we should plan for them. It’s ok to start with a small plan, maybe upgrade one computer and software a year as your budget allows, and make an intentional plan to replace all of it, and make an intentional plan to continue to upgrade every few years and soon enough everything in the room is working like this run-on sentence is.
PK
