Your website is the most important presence you have online. It is the face of your organization and can persuade visitors to engage you, or drive them away from your cause. Building a website can be as simple as a drag-and-drop on Wix with all the info your audience could ever want about you on a single homepage. It can be as complex as years of deliberation, procrastination, and dozens of web pages drafted with no end in sight. I would not suggest either of these scenarios, but I have often seen these and other messy website situations that can feel overwhelming and hopeless.
Let’s get into my top five list of things that I help ministries work through as they build or refresh their websites.
This is the most important question you’ll ask yourself when refreshing or rebuilding your site. You are not building your site for you, your executive team, or anyone else on your staff. Your site is meant to be the primary online source of information and inspiration for your donors and/or clients – depending on your website model. Whoever your primary audience is, it’s them you need to be designing for. In order to do that, you need to know that audience well.
If you don’t have these branding guardrails, then every page, every element, is going to be an unfortunate opportunity to be its own artistic expression and not a reinforcement of your organizational identity. This problem escalates quickly – especially with many hands in the mix – and eventually, the words and designs of the site are a jumble of different voices that drown out the necessary singular voice of the organization. Basing your site on a well-thought-out brand guide is essential to the integrity and effectiveness of a website.
Once you know who your audience is, and you have a brand guide to steer the copy and design of the site, you need to establish what the primary, secondary, and tertiary goals are. This will allow you to throw off the burden of giving all the good ideas equal focus. If your site is primarily aimed at fundraising, then that is the predominant language and design that your visitors should experience. Your main call to action in the menu should highlight the opportunity to give. Your language as people navigate the site should be alternating versions of a donation funnel, each with different levels of commitment to accommodate the different levels of readiness from your community. Targeting your content is a powerful step towards creating an effective website.
Once you’re ready to start building, it’s important that you use the right tools to get the job done. WordPress is the most popular website platform in the world, with over 43% of all sites. However, your needs go beyond just building the site. A beautiful site with no contact generation tools or funnels that drive action is like a fishing net full of holes. For almost every client I’ve interacted with, they’ve desired to grow their contact list, reach more clients, and raise more funds on their site. Unfortunately, this is very difficult with WordPress websites. These sites tend to be slower, more difficult to build and maintain, highly vulnerable to crashes and hacks, and become outdated very quickly. HubSpot is a great alternative and almost every client I’ve worked with has chosen to migrate to this CMS platform that is not only a user-friendly drag-and-drop website builder, but includes a contact database, email marketing, and much more starting at only $15/mo.
Working with the right people can make all the difference. You could have every other tip I’ve mentioned fully developed, but using the wrong team to implement the work could be disastrous. When working at Union Gospel Mission, our team hired a large advertising agency to film several commercials for us. We let them know that these commercials were about expanding the audience’s understanding of UGM (Union Gospel Mission). We wanted people to know that we were more than just 3 meals and a bed. UGM’s primary drive was long-term recovery, restoring families, trauma counseling, work placement, and other amazing long-term impacts.
You’ll never guess what the agency put together. It was 4 ads featuring food, beds, and emergency care. Uff da. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve entered work with a ministry who is at the end of their rope because the previous agency that promised them the moon is still “working” on their website 12 months after the contract started. Or, they have a site that’s barely held together, and the firm is charging a hefty “retainer” every month so that the site doesn’t… spontaneously combust, or something. A good turnaround for most sites (if you have the prep work done) is 60-90 days. Any more than that and someone is missing the mark.
James Bishop Co. was created to address several issues ministries face when developing their marketing foundations: cost, timeline, and understanding. Building a beautiful and effective website at a cost considerate of ministry budgets, having the site ready in months and not years, and knowing that the team assisting you gets the ministry community are all valuable and headache-saving realities that I wish every nonprofit had. If you’re looking to build a new site, or you’re stuck in a never-ending website project, I’d love to help you out. Our team can walk you through the process, build your site, and support you after it’s finished so that you can focus on the ministry that God has called you to.