Where Do You Need to Improve Your Digital Experience?

When it comes to supporting the many goals of your nonprofit, no one element is as important as your overall digital experience. A high-performing website can help you better engage with your constituents, drive the actions that are most important to your nonprofit, and support your overarching mission. So, what makes a digital experience “high-performing”? While the specific metrics and goals of a website will differ from nonprofit to nonprofit, we at BackOffice Thinking have identified six underlying principles that are shared by all high-performing sites.

Question 1: Which of these terms best describes your primary constituency?

Visitors or patrons who receive goods or experiences (museums, arts, etc.)

Community members who receive assistance from your organization (health or human services)

Take this quiz to see how your site measures up, and where you have the greatest opportunity to improve.

Useful Intentional Valuable

Scalable Engaging Personalized

High-Performance Guiding Principles: Valuable: A strong website provides relevant, targeted content that is easy to access, showing your audience that your organization is uniquely suited to serve their needs. Scalable: As your community grows and you serve a larger audience, your digital experience needs to continue to support the expanding needs of your constituents.

For a digital experience to be considered effective, it must be:

Members who share a common interest (professional organizations, faith-based organizations, hobby guilds, etc.)

High-Performance Guiding Principles: Engaging: Use your digital experience to provide content and information on their shared interest, and create a platform that builds community. Personalized: Support your recruitment initiatives by targeting the content of your website to the interests and needs of your intended audience.

High-Performance Guiding Principles: Intentional: What needs to change about your strategy? Where can you better use your existing data? Work to get a clear vision of how your new offering will fit into your current digital experience. Useful: Change – even positive change – can be scary! Be sure to identify the most critical information about your new offering, and communicate the differences to your audience clearly and repeatedly.

High-Performance Guiding Principles: Engaging: Keep your members and employees around for the long haul by habitually adding new content to your website, publishing compelling stories, and building a community. Valuable: Don’t fall into the trap of publishing new content just to publish new content. Take the time and effort to ensure that everything you put out into the world is serving a clear purpose.

High-Performance Guiding Principles: Personalized: Give your audience more reasons to be a part of your organization by crafting landing pages and calls-to-action that specifically reflect their needs and communicate your value. Scalable: Ensure your digital experience can keep up with your growth campaigns – not just handle increased traffic, but support active experimentation efforts with features like A/B testing and dynamic content.

We want to grow our organization (gain more members, volunteers, donors, etc.)

We want to retain our current member and employee base

We want to scale our impact with new offerings

Question 2: What are your main goals for your member/donor/constituent base for next 3 years?

High-Performance Guiding Principles: Intentional: The more aware you are of your retention rate, the more you can do to improve it – commit today to start keeping tabs on member churn! (Would a new CRM or other system help?) Useful: Your digital experience needs to support your internal goals and mission-critical needs, not just those of your audience. Be sure to invest in tools and systems that will collect the data (like churn rate) that matter most to your organization.

High-Performance Guiding Principles: Personalized: Low churn means that your organization has ample opportunity to collect loads of member data. Use this information to provided personalized content and messaging to further engage with your audience. Scalable: Develop opportunities within your digital experience to activate your most engaged constituents (social sharing, referral programs, etc.), giving your supporters a voice to help scale your growth efforts.

High-Performance Guiding Principles: Valuable: A high churn rate could indicate that your audience isn’t getting value from your digital experience. This might mean you need to provide richer content, or make it easier for visitors to find what they’re after. Engaging: How are you following up after an initial conversion? Are you sending emails to new members? Inviting them to participate in a community? Establishing a clear communication cadence can help keep people engaged.

Less than 1 year (high churn) – we lose and gain a lot each year

2-5 years (low churn) – people stick around forever

I don’t know! – we’re not effectively tracking this

Question 3: What is the average duration of your member/constituent relationship?

High-Performance Guiding Principles: Useful: It’s great that you’ve found a schedule that works! Just be sure to keep things fresh, adding timely content as part of your marketing mix. Hours changing with the season? Send an update. New exhibit opening? Offer email subscribers an exclusive first-look. Engaging: Don’t get complacent just because everything feels right – measure your success in a quantifiable way. Keep an eye on key performance indicators to make sure your messaging continues to resonate.

High-Performance Guiding Principles: Valuable: Infrequent communication diminishes your impact! Remind your audience that you exist, and add value to the relationship by creating and publishing unique content that supports your mission and drives audience engagement. Scalable: Is your communication cadence hindered by the tools you’re using? Look for opportunities to upgrade your technology, removing digital bottlenecks around creating campaigns and automating or scheduling messages ahead of time.

High-Performance Guiding Principles: Personalized: If your current strategy is to “e-blast” your list with the same generic message, you’re not creating a relationship. Take the time to segment your list and send communications that match the interests of different groups. Intentional: Too-frequent emailing can be a symptom of an unclear communication strategy. Improve performance by identifying your communication goals, and use data like click-throughs and conversions to find what works for your audience.

Probably too much – we send emails nearly every day!

Probably too little – I mean, we have a quarterly newsletter?

Just right – you’re talking to Goldilocks, here.

Question 4: How do you feel about your communication cadence with your members/constituents/donors?

High-Performance Guiding Principles: Useful: Your digital experience is a tool for your organization and its member base. Be sure you aren’t limiting the usefulness of your website (or your ability to collect personalized data) by not offering a gated portal. Engaging: A gated portal can be a great tool for engagement. Use this area to highlight your best content, provide donor and payment gateways, and create opportunities for members to interact with each other.

High-Performance Guiding Principles: Intentional: Do you have a strategy or choice map for determining what content you gate and don’t gate? Be sure the content (on either side of the gate) aligns with the expectations and needs of your users based on where they are in their organizational journey. Scalable: Take the headache out of managing new memberships by automating the member conversion process. Improve your team workflows by eliminating any friction points that would keep a non-member from joining and gaining immediate access to gated content.

High-Performance Guiding Principles: Personalized: Gated content areas are an ideal opportunity to provide users with that special personal touch. Welcome them by name when they log in, or display suggested content based on what you know about their interests – give them an experience worth logging into. Valuable: One question to consider: If your best content is gated, how will non-members know it exists? Don’t hide ALL the good stuff behind a login – pick a few items to offer as a sneak peek to demonstrate your value and drive the public to become members.

Yes, basically everything is gated

Yes, some content is public and other content is gated

No gates here, everything is open for viewing:

Question 5: Does your website feature a sign-in portal into a dedicated member/constituent area?

Quit letting a sub-standard website sabotage your great work. It may sound unfair, but your audience will not engage with your organization or its mission if they are distracted and frustrated by a poor digital experience.

The best performing digital experiences are the ones that are the perfect mix of:

How Does Your Digital Experience Stack Up?

Useful: Critical information should be readily accessible.

Intentional: The actions and intended journey of your users should be apparent.

Valuable: Your members should walk away from every interaction with your digital experience feeling like it was “worth it”.

Scalable: Your platform should grow with you.

Engaging: Content should forge a stronger emotional connection between your audience and your organization.

Personalized: Connect with your members one-on-one to make them feel more valued and essential to your organization.

Take the time to understand what elements of your digital experience could benefit from some T.L.C., then put together an action plan to improve these areas. If you aren’t sure where to begin, we can help. Our team of skilled professionals works almost exclusively with nonprofits and understands the unique challenges of the nonprofit space. Reach out to us today to get started improving your digital experience.

Still have questions? Learn more in our newest eGuide, The 6 Principles of High-Performing Nonprofit Digital Experiences.

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BackOfficeThinking.com

Choose an answer to learn more about how to improve your digital experience.

Choose an answer to learn more about how the principles can help your digital experience.

What are your main goals for your member/donor/constituent base for next 3 years?

The 6 Principles of High-Performing Sites

High-Performance Guiding Principles: Useful: Your website should make it absurdly easy for your audience to look up essential information about your organization – hours, directions, pricing, event details, etc. Intentional: Clear calls to action (“CTAs”) throughout your site should drive constituent activities that are most important to your organization – purchase tickets, make event reservations, sign up to volunteer, etc.

Useful Intentional Valuable

Scalable Engaging Personalized

Choose an answer to learn more about how to improve your digital experience.

Question 2: What are your main goals for your member/donor/constituent base for next 3 years?