Common challenges in NGO website design
NGO websites can often feel like an afterthought - clunky with poor functionality, outdated design, broken links and generally uninspiring to users. But just as for for-profit businesses, your website plays a key role in communicating who you are to the world, and acts as an important tool for achieving organisational goals.
Designing an effective and engaging website for NGOs presents unique challenges. The rapidly evolving landscape of design trends, web tools, and UX best practices can make the updating of a website feel like a never-ending process. Moreover, NGOs typically have complex website requirements, such as donation pages, membership areas, and extensive resource libraries. This means it’s even more important to have a robust website strategy in place to ensure that the site effectively serves its users.
Over the past two years working with NGOs as a web strategist, I’ve noticed the same themes and challenges cropping up time and time again, despite these organistions working in vastly different fields. Below you’ll find the top challenges I see NGOs facing when rebuilding their website, and how to tackle and overcome these challenges.
Conveying effectiveness and impact
NGOs constantly have to prove the work they are doing is effective, meaningful and has a positive impact. It is common practice for websites of this nature to have an impact page or section, which helps audiences understand the organisation's work and the impact it has. I regularly see NGOs trying to grapple with how best to convey their impact, and it can be a challenge to find the right statistics or content to include.
Tip: Think beyond an impact page and implement impact related content throughout the website. This does not mean posting statistics on every page, but thinking about the language you use, the content that’s featured, and the overall look and feel.
Organising content
If there’s one thing NGO websites have in common, particularly for membership-based organisations, it’s the sheer amount of content, in the form of resources such as reports, articles, factsheets etc., that they need to hold. Very often an NGO’s work spans several issue areas and regions, with corresponding projects, partners and campaigns. In my work leading website strategies for these kinds of NGOs, there is almost always a lengthy discussion and workshop about how best to organise this work in a cohesive way, which, importantly, makes sense to users. A key challenge for those involved is to step outside their organisation, and see things through the eyes of the target audience. Oftentimes, what makes perfect sense to the team, who know their organisations work intimately, does not make sense or resonate with new website users.
Tip: Use user journey analysis to create a content hierarchy, and stick with this throughout the website, utilising tagging to connect different areas of work.
Consolidation
I will never stop encouraging organisations to say less on their websites. Web page and content consolidation is almost always a key recommendation in my web strategies. Building on the point about stepping outside of an organisation being key to effective communications, team members often lose sight of how a website, its pages and work being presented, are perceived to outsiders, who don’t know industry terminology and are not interested in lengthy web copy (at least at first). Can several web pages be combined? Where can copy be cut down? Don’t be afraid to shrink the size of your website.
Tip: Refer to your communications strategy and use this as a guide to what key messages you want to convey on the website. Use simple, straightforward language - users do not appreciate having to work to find out what you do.
Inspiring action
A website will play a key role for NGOs who want their audiences to take action, whether in the form of a donation, signing a petition, or joining a campaign. For membership-based NGOs, recruiting new members will likely be a key strategic goal. User journeys are therefore vital to your website strategy - what do members of your audience consider when deciding to engage? What or who influences their decision? NGO team members often assume they know how users will interact with their website, or what will make them take action. But in reality, you won’t know until audience and UX research is conducted. Once you do have a solid user journey, think about where calls-to-action make sense, and what content is required to support the user in their decision. And again, think beyond the buttons and wording - what colours or images inspire action? How can you convey trust across the whole site, so users feel confident in giving up their money or time?
Tip: Talk to your target audience through interviews, and use this to inform audience analysis work. Find out exactly what they need from the website to take action.
Undertaking a website redesign project can be daunting. It should not be underestimated, but with the right process in place it does not have to be difficult. While it can be tempting to ‘just get something online’, in the long-run this approach will be detrimental and costly. The primary objective of any website should be to serve its users. Invest the time into a thorough website strategy and you will lay the foundations for a website which not only effectively conveys to the world who you are and what you stand for, but inspires action and stands the test of time.
I can help you conduct audience analysis, design user journeys, and then work with a UX/UI designer to translate a website strategy into a compelling new website. Get in touch to organise a free discovery consultation.