Nonprofit Website Redesign: Identity + Brain

Developing Your Interface

In a previous blog post, we talked about Breaking the “Brochureware” Mindset and thinking about your organization’s Constituent User Interface (CUI) as an interactive hub. Now, we are going to focus on two primary concepts that can help you develop your CUI:

Your Organization’s Identity: Your public “persona,” the face you’re presenting to the world

Your Organization’s Brain: Your behind-the-scenes data, the information driving your work

Your Identity

The identity of your nonprofit organization is made up of three components: Brand, Message, and Story. All three need to be understood at a strategic level in order to execute effective communications, marketing, and fundraising.

BRAND
In today’s world, nonstop access to the Internet, and increased technology adoption in general, have given anyone and everyone the ability to “broadcast” to the world. This has created a lot of chatter or noise that can get in the way of nonprofits that want to communicate and mobilize people to change the world in a particular way. Effective branding is extremely important in helping to rise above and cut through the noise.

In many ways, strong branding is now an expectation of the general public. If you don’t have a clear, identifiable brand image, they assume you are not credible or permanent.

MESSAGE
“If you can’t explain it to a 6-year old, you don’t know it yourself.” – (commonly misattributed to) Albert Einstein

Einstein may not have actually said this phrase, but it’s still a helpful guideline! Make sure you have the language to clearly communicate your organization’s mission and goals. Take the time to create a message that can be used by those in your organization in various forms. Start simply, and add in layers of detail as people engage further.

STORY
Most nonprofit organizations have powerful stories to tell. Stories of their beginnings and stories of impact. Telling these stories will help you establish your identity in your donors’ minds.

Good storytelling has a structure, and connects both on an intellectual and emotional level. Hollywood understands this — just look at any number of classic books and movies. There is a pattern there that you can use to grab attention and get people to absorb your message. Donald Miller presents a great formula for telling stories:

“A character has a problem, then meets a guide who gives them a plan and calls them to action. That action either results in a success or failure.” Who are the characters in your organization’s story?

Your “Brain”

Your organization’s “Brain” is all the intelligence gathered and stored around your mission and your constituents. This can be anything from demographic data about constituents, historical data about contributions and grants, specific data presented as a resource for your members… and more. As I see it, the “Brain” is the data itself, combined with the systems and automation you use to enhance your constituents’ user experience and forward your mission.

The most common and obvious data collected by most nonprofit organizations is contact information for your donors. This type of data is often stored in a CRM (Constituent Relationship Management) system like Neon CRM, Salesforce, CiviCRM, IMIS, Salsa, Raiser’s Edge, DonorPerfect, or so on. Many of these systems can track and store more than just contact information: donation activity, event registration, notes, membership, and other types of activities.

What does this have to do with your website? Well, websites can interact with all kinds of data to help you tell your story — crafting a message that improves the constituent experience. If you’re a land trust, you have all sorts of data to share about the land you protect. If you’re a museum, you have memberships that grant benefits and can be renewed. If you’re a business association, maybe you have a question bank that feeds into a Learning Management System (LMS).

Maybe you take aggregate information and show it as a visualization or live infographic, to quickly demonstrate your impact to visitors who are moving fast through your website:

Or maybe you use individual data about your constituents to personalize your site, with landing pages designed to focus on specific interests:

When you combine your organization’s identity with the brain of your business, you’ll come up with unique ways to engage with your audience. In our next post, we’ll show you how to take all you have learned so far and apply it to your design.

Discover more resources for making your land trust website a powerful marketing & fundraising tool on our Powerful Land Trusts page.