Great advice on crafting a home page from A List Apart. In short: build it last, and work first on the details (the smallest, ubiquitous elements of your site). A great homepage with poor search results or product page will only lead to disappointment. So if your site is shallow and ugly on the inside, make sure your homepage is too. Also:
If a first time visitor to your site’s home page does not understand what it is within three seconds, you’ve failed goal number one, so feel free to skip the rest. The only people who will use the site are the people who already know what it does. Or, ya know, masochists.
While I’m in a website-improvement mood, there is also a handy post today from Alt Tags, summarizing the Five Steps to a Better Website in the New Year (via the ever-useful 456 Bera St.). In short:
- Give Your Content Some Attention
- Validate Your Website’s Relevance
- Think About Your Customers
- Review Your Site Navigation
- Identify Accessibility Problems
Here’s an interesting article from an old Harvard Business School Working Knowledge series. It’s about branding, which from my perspective is a very diffucult thing to incorporate in online communications.
Websites and emails, for example, need to reflect some kind of graphical relationship with the rest of your organization. But I think they should also reflect a “tone” of your organization and its role in the world.
This article deals with these concerns in a broader sense. Here’s a bit:
One of the additional challenges nonprofit brands face is that they must appeal to a broader array of stakeholders. Nonprofit brands have a dual objective: to enhance fundraising and to ensure the implementation of the organization’s mission. In addition, nonprofit organizations tend to be more decentralized, with little formal hierarchy. This can mean that implementing activities that protect the brand or attempting to update or modify the brand often meets with resistance internally. In some cases, highly decentralized organizations such as Medecins Sans Frontiers [also known as Doctors without Borders] depend on their brand to provide organization cohesion. The brand is the glue holding the components of the global organization together.
You can read the whole thing here:
HBS Working Knowledge: Social Enterprise: The Tricky Business of Nonprofit Brands
When Nonprofit X goes to county Y and begins handing out seeds and fertilizer to farmers as part of an agricultural intervention during a famine, how does Nonprofit X know that they aren’t causing a greater problem or ignoring a better solution? Perhaps it turns out the fertilizer is more valuable when it is sold on the nearby market than it is in the ground. Perhaps microloans or digging new wells are better solutions that the population is looking for.
At any rate, even in this very simple hypothetical situation, it is clear that you have to go there. You have to ask and investigate. You should, in short, behave in a manner very similar to that of a market researcher. In fact, if we undertook all of our development decisions with a rigorous marketing mindset, we’d be going in far fewer circles with misused money.
This is the gist of a thought-provoking article from the Harvard Business School on the concept of marketing being used in human development situations involving poverty. I think it is especially pertinent for folks involved with technology and communications because of the heavy (though often overlooked) influence of advertising and marketing in all media.
I would call this a process of evaluation, but the “marketing” concept works well.
In many poverty-reduction programs, be they governmental, philanthropic or academic, the decision making about method — how to alleviate poverty — comes from the top down. This makes sense in many ways, and I’m certainly thankful for the developed world’s research institutions, mulling and muttering in their thinktanks about how to best deal with poor farmers and streetworkers around the world.
But programs have to take all of their stakeholders into account when it comes to crafting policy — and that should mean subjecting proposed solutions to the “market” of consumers — the population in poverty. In traditional markets, this process is essential, because bad ideas don’t make money and are necessarily reformed or removed from the market. But in many governmental and philanthropic situations, bad ideas can thrive.
This is a concept of including the population you are serving the in the program decisions that you are making. It’s that simple.
Here’s a bit:
“We’re making the important distinction of replacing the exchange paradigm with an intervention paradigm, where we say we’re intervening to change lives, not to change consumer choices.
… Four billion people are outside the exchange network. But it’s not as though these folks have nothing to do with marketing. Somebody is approaching them. Somebody might approach a poor subsistence farmer in Uganda to say, ‘We want to give you some agricultural aid. We want to give you a loan.’
There again, why is advocacy important? Because even in that case, what we find is that they have already decided what’s good for the farmer. They already decided that what’s good for the farmer is these kinds of implements, these kinds of equipment, this kind of loan. In fact, the farmer may say, ‘Given everything else, that’s not exactly the kind of output that is going to enhance my life. I want security and food for the family first, before I become this terrific entrepreneur.’”
Read the entire article at the Harvard Business School website.
Create usable content? It doesn’t sound like a difficult goal. But upon reconsideration, it is clear that the web (in particular) has become a waste of your time. The visual aspects of the internet are all distractions without quality content. And that means content that is useful and clear.
Is your website full of unclear, inconsistent, out-of-date, unrevised content? It’s out of style; let’s all move on together now as a one happy sector.
So three cheers for web designer Keith Robinson’s focus this week on content.
Here’s a great sample from his post today:
What Usable Content Is
* Usable content is clear and easy to understand.
* Usable content can bridge gaps: things like language barriers, disability and cultural differences.
* Usable content is meaningful.
* Usable content makes the reader feel smart.
* Usable content is goal and audience appropriate.
* It’s thought-out, planned and constantly maintained.
* It’s fresh, light and lively.
* It’s content that is organized in a way that people understand and can get their mind around.
* It’s designed to be accessible.
* It’s reusable and shareable, readily available and easy to locate.
* It’s straightforward, open and honest and to the point.
* It encourages feedback and is engineered for conversation.
* It’s hard work, but worthy of the job.
What Usable Content Is Not
* Usable content is not clever, obtuse or misleading.
* It’s not marketing drivel, or bland branding messages.
* It’s not longwinded.
* It’s not written at the highest possible reading level.
* It’s doesn’t use ‘big words’ unless they are needed.
* It’s not legalese.
* It’s not double talk.
* It’s not an afterthought.
* It’s not a mission statement.
* It’s not an org chart.
* It’s not self-centered.
Stephen Pinker writes in his book How Minds Work that “the emotions are mechanisms that set the brains highest-level goals.” This, it seems, is a good description of why small, mission-driven nonprofits exist despite the innumerable difficulties of keeping such an operation afloat. It’s also an essential idea to consider when advertising your organization.
People are drawn to imagery and emotions that inspire them to work for a cause. If you have ever been saddled with the task of creating ads or promotional material for your organization, you would do well to keep these emotions — not facts about your job or accomplishments — at the front of your mind.
This concept is just one idea among many in an immensely useful e-book published a couple of years ago by Cause Communications called Why Bad Ads Happen to Good Causes. It should be in every nonprofit office (unless you have the luxury of an ad department to think about such things). It covers broad ideas like the above, but it also goes into detail about using layout and text to keep people reading and engaged in your message. And it has great reviews of nonprofit ads over the last 10 years. It is, in short, an eminently readable advertising textbook for nonprofits; check it out before your next ad deadline.
If you like to think about branding (not a really pleasant idea, I think), you’d do well to visit the wealth of information at the PND Nonprofits By Design Column.
Read it: PND Nonprofits By Design