Non-profits & social mission organizations

Improving the non-profit Web experience

As a committed non-profit professional, you’re acutely aware of your organization’s purpose and how your organization works toward creating a more just society…but do you have the same understanding of why your organization is online, or how the Internet fits into the picture? If your organization struggles with the same constraints that many others do, the Internet is probably a fuzzy thing that often falls quite low on the list of organizational priorities.

This lack of focus often results in a poor online experience for your clients and community. It can also present your organization negatively in the eyes of grant makers and potential employees. Phillip’s experience can help you cut through the clutter of personal opinions to shine a light into the heart of what your organization is doing to change the world online.

Extending logic to the Web

One common way of documenting and understanding your organization’s mission, objectives, activities, and measurements is called a logic model. The logic model has been used for more than 30 years and was one of the first tools used to describe the different components of an organization’s programs in a way that makes it easier to match activities to outcomes.

Phillip can help you extend these concepts using a tool that he started developing in 2005, called the Web logic model: a fully integrated view of your organization that can help you to see how the Internet can support your strategic objectives, and gives you the tools needed to assess the impact of your online activities and to measure the return on your technology investments.

Understanding your community

For larger sites, new projects, or Web site redesigns, it is important to step back and document the birds-eye view of how an online community interacts with your information space. Building on tools like the Web logic model — and extending your understanding further by investigating who you are speaking to and why — Phillip can help you to document all of the ways that people are interacting with your online content.

This is accomplished through a series of exercises — including user definition, contextual inquiry, and task analysis — to develop a more thorough understanding of your organization’s audiences, both online and offline. This exploration usually results in a series of recommendations for small shifts in strategy, architecture, navigation design, or page layout that can have a measurable impact on your Web initiative’s success.

Prioritizing your investments

Once you have a clear understanding of how the Web fits into your organization’s strategy, it becomes easier to prioritize choices and to make decisions about what to focus on. Whether it’s as straightforward as working with you to produce a successful online survey that actually gets the response rate you need or as complex as working with your organization to plan a national technology initiative, Phillip has experience helping values-aligned organizations explore, evaluate and deploy technology solutions for many of the most common online initiatives; and he can help you navigate the complex world of hosted, proprietary, and free and open-source software options for everything from content publishing to community management.

Whether you’re a radical social justice collective, part of the next generation of worker cooperatives, or a traditional NGO that is breaking new ground: when you’re planning your next technology initiative — from a simple refresh to a global relaunch — please take a moment to contact Phillip to explore how he can support your work.