Can a web project increase your impact?

An impacful website is based on user focused design principles. Who do you need to reach? What are their attitudes? What are their needs? How can these needs best be met?

These seemingly simple questions provide a powerful way of thinking about your organisation from the outside-in. The consequence – sometimes unintended, but powerful nonetheless – of a user focused perspective, is that organisations sometimes discover the need to redesign, not just their website, but their services to match.

Product design

This idea isn’t as odd as it might seem. The Four P’s of marketing are well know: Product, Promotion, Placement and Price. Optimising each of these qualities is key to an effective marketing effort. For our purposes, it’s the Product aspect that is particularly interesting, since ensuring you have designed the right product is at the heart of a successful sale.

Very often, non-profits, particularly when they have been running a long time, become quite inward-looking. They forget to consult their audiences or conduct research into what their users need or want. We’re frequently amazed at how little a lot of charities know about their customers.

In some cases, a dependency on grant income can magnify this problem, as organisations end up restructuring to chase funders rather than end-users.

An example

A good real-life example of this is a charity that supports disabled people, but which has gradually lost track of its primary mission.

It was originally founded as a mutual support network for parents, which played a crucial role in empowering parents to help each other through the enormous practical and emotional challenges of raising a disabled child. Over the years, the charity has since become dependent on government grants to deliver services, such as housing, support and also lobbying on rights issues for the disabled community.

All this new activity is good stuff. But, while the charity has become very good at delivering these government-funded services, it has also gradually begun to forget its core constituency: the parents of disabled people, the active carers, whose lives are changed for ever through having a disabled child. Gradually, over time, the charity’s thinking and its marketing messages have shifted away from this group, becoming increasingly concerned with targeting commissioners and decreasingly targeted at parents.

Naturally, parents began to drift away. The long terms effect is that the charity’s supporter base has become badly eroded and the charity now finds itself in ‘death valley’ – with an ageing supporter profile.

The parents left, not because they were angry or had a specific grievance, but because they found other charities which addressed their needs and experiences more directly.

How the website project helped with redesigning services

Our research for the website project for this charity uncovered the need to reconnect with parents in order to rebuild its supporter base. Through interviews with parents, the research established that they wanted the charity to understand that they are committed carers, but with their own needs – for practical and emotional support, for the chance to meet other families and for family-focused information services.

The charity’s rights and needs agenda could remain, but a shift in focus was needed if it was going to reconnect with its future supporters.

Service modelling

Taking these research-based user insights and applying them to online spaces for families meant that we could create a model of what the ideal family-focused services offering would look like.

Our model acknowledged families’ emotional needs, spoke to them in language that they could understand and began to reformulate services, particularly information and advice, in a way that was appropriate to the audience.

Through this process, the virtual space provided by the website became a prototype for the rest of the charity’s information and advice services. A new family focused support service was set up. Information leaflets were redesigned. A new information strategy was devised. In this way, the web project became a catalyst for a major organisational rethink and, ultimately, a way of making the organisation more effective and securing its future supporter base.

Greater impact

While on the surface a web project may seem relatively modest endeavour, the emphasis it places on user research, and prototyping user experiences, provides a powerful visualisation tool for thinking about service marketing and service design: how services are presented, how they are described, who they are targeted at, and so on.

So an investment in website development can produce a return well beyond the immediately apparent benefits of a fresh and compelling visual design. For a charity or community organisation, this clearer focus on users means the website can significantly increase your impact and help you become more effective at delivering your mission. It provides a great opportunity for thinking about your services in a new way, and a chance to have a real impact on the things that matter.