What are Good Examples of Web Design for Non-Profits?

January 20, 2022 10:20 AM

Can you share a very effective website for a small social justice organization? What makes it good?

The social and environmental justice nonprofit I work for needs a new website. We are fortunately pretty autonomous so there are no restrictions on what we have to use or what we want to do.

We are going to hire a professional to design, but I am leading the organizing and conceptual big picture of this project. I want to be able to clarify what we want and evaluate what we get.

I've read some pieces on dos and donts which have been helpful. We do not need to solicit or manage donations, so that's not a consideration.

posted by alsoran to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

This is hard without knowing what you want the website to do. If you don’t want to solicit donations, maybe you want visitors to learn an important fact (a health condition is more common than they think), be spurred to do an activity (like a health screening), sign up to volunteer, or remember the name of the organization when one of their patients has a specific need. Let us know what you want the website to accomplish and we can look for some good examples.
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 12:43 PM on January 20, 2022 [7 favorites]

You should look at what hyperakt does, they design a lot of nice looking, up to date nonprofit sites.
posted by RajahKing at 12:58 PM on January 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

Agree as hard as possible with chesty_a_arthur: establishing what you need the website to do first will really help narrow down whose examples do that thing well, and preclude you from spending time/energy/money designing things you don't need. Have you done any reading on human-centered design?

For inspiration, are there any large/well-established non-profits that do what your org does, or that you/your team admire? What do you like/dislike about their sites?

From experience, make ruthless edits for things the team thinks would be nice-to-have and focus on the NEED-to-have - and then cut that list down as much as possible. It's also helpful to take stock of which functions/content are most likely to change, when, and plan for how those changes will be accommodated by your design. (E.g., if there's a lot of staff turnover, what specific benefits/costs are there to building and maintaining a staff page? If your team hardly ever posts on social media, will it be a net positive or a net negative to show your most recent posts on the main page? By comparison, posting your non-profit tax documents - 990 in the US - is always going to be something people will want to find.)

Non-profit teams often have huge plans for their websites to cover everything they do, store and manage all knowledge, speak to all people, etc. It can be exhausting and demoralizing to try to make the One Thing To Rule Them All right at the start. Good luck, and have fun! Thanks for helping your team do the good work of social justice.
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 1:42 PM on January 20, 2022

Response by poster: This is hard without knowing what you want the website to do.

Good point! Thank you.

I think a good website for us, is one where people who hear or see our name someplace will:

-understand who we are
-what kind of work we do
-what things we've done lately, and things that are coming up
-MAYBE how to get involved

does that help? Very happy to be pushed to say this better/more clearly, it's instructional for me.
-our bios and social media links
posted by alsoran at 1:50 PM on January 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

I'd start with who do you want to come to the site, and what exactly do you want them to do while on the site? If you design anything without a solid answer to that question, you are just guessing, and odds are you won't guess right. Read up on human centered or user centered design, and maybe run some internal workshops to profile your 2 or 3 stakeholder groups that you want/need to do something on the site. Any higher end design shop can also lead you through these exercises as part of a redesign project if you have money to throw at it, but since you said, "small social justice organization" I'm assuming you probably don't have a big budget to throw at it!
posted by COD at 2:18 PM on January 20, 2022 [3 favorites]

I'm a fan of The Ocean Cleanup's site.
posted by Threeve at 9:32 PM on January 20, 2022

I've worked on web design and development for nonprofits for years, and I'll echo all of the above and also add that budget is going to be a big factor here.

At one of my jobs, we gave new clients a form to fill out and asked them to share a few nonprofit websites that they liked and what they liked about them, and we discussed their responses in a kickoff call. Almost every single client included https://www.charitywater.org/ (it became a running joke at our company). That is, in fact, a beautiful website, but it's also a very complex one, which means and it was not cheap to build or maintain.

The needs for your site sound very straightforward, especially since you don't need to deal with donation management, so you'll probably have some more wiggle room in your budget for a more sophisticated design.

To that end, you said "We are going to hire a professional to design" – is this same person going to actually be building the site? If not, will they be actively involved in passing off their design to a developer? This is another big thing to consider as it's unfortunately not uncommon for designers to create gorgeous designs that are difficult to implement within a nonprofit budget.
posted by anotheraccount at 5:27 AM on January 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: is this same person going to actually be building the site? If not, will they be actively involved in passing off their design to a developer? This is another big thing to consider as it's unfortunately not uncommon for designers to create gorgeous designs that are difficult to implement within a nonprofit budget.

based on what you shared, I think it should absolutely be the same designer and builder. Thank you
posted by alsoran at 8:41 AM on January 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

Sure thing! One note: depending on your budget and what you're aiming for, "design" can mean different things. Most people who do both web design and development are not going to provide you with full-fledged visual mockups for an entire site. They may do wireframes or even set up a basic version of the site for your initial review. Feel free to DM me if you have any questions!
posted by anotheraccount at 10:48 AM on January 21, 2022 [1 favorite]