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Case studies
- Small, nonprofit organization website issues
6-15-01 What I'm learning about websites for
small non-profit organizations.
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Introduction
I'm helping a friend with a non-profit organization's
website. The organization supports families and patients
affected by a fatal disease but I suspect that the issues are the same for
political nonprofits as well: The budget is too small to fund an
experienced webmaster, even part-time. The site may not be useful
enough to generate excitement in the community.
It's a national organization with small chapters in nearly
every state. My friend is one of four dedicated, overworked, under paid
folks serving one state. They coordinate activities of numerous
donors, volunteers, families, and other resources who help support the
patients and champion patients' issues. I salute them.
I have three questions. Can a website help? Can
four busy, under-funded, folks support a useful site? Can you spend
too much energy on a site for a small community. I think the
answers can be yes, yes, and maybe. But, the constraints are severe.
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Researching similar sites
The first thing I did was to visit all of the other state
chapter websites and the national organization's website. What could
we learn from them?
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The national site is obviously professionally designed
and maintained. It lists all of the state chapters, links to a
binch of related sites: about the disease, medical professionals,
support resources, etc.
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The local chapters' sites are fundamentally like
ours. Some have a more professional design than other. Most are
"brochure" sites. Dynamic content consists of an
events calendar, event reports, and an occasional news item.
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Most sites have lists and/or links to local
resources. Most also have links to national resources.
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Only one site has a mailing list sign-up.
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None have a forum or discussion group for community
contributions.
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Each site is a little island. Each seems to have
reinvented the chapter website wheel.
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The history and timeline of the
site
It is safe to say that chapter employees are spread too
thin to become web experts. It is also safe to say that the websites
have small or non-existent budgets. Our case if probably typical:
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A community volunteer designed, built, and published
the initial site.
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Another community member agreed to host the site for
free as a sub-site. So, site support is not available from the
actual web host. It has to flow through a site donor who is
probably busy doing something else right now.
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The volunteers set up a NFS like connection between
FrontPage 98 and the free server. Editing a page consists of
opening the file from the server, changing it, and saving it
back to the server.
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Over the course of 10 months a succession of
non-technical employees served as webmaster and did minimal site
updates.
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The original volunteer designer/publisher/free host
has nearly forgotten everything about it. There are no
statistics on visitors.
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After 10 months everyone wants some improvements,
changes, and additions.
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The chapter locates an experienced volunteer (me) to
"update" the site.
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The experienced volunteer (me) has big ideas and wants to do a simple but complete redesign. But,
that's overdoing it. Then new volunteer
recalls the saying, "History is not just what was, it is also
what is." The site has some good information and the staff
knows the community.
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Who is in the community
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Patients in various stages of the disease. The
personal computer and the Internet become a primary means of
communication. Patients ultimately require alternative and
expensive devices for managing the keyboard and the mouse.
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Patients' families and family caregivers.
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Volunteer caregivers.
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The Chapter's staff.
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The Chapter's board of directors and advisory groups.
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Professional medical caregivers.
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Related and overlapping nonprofit communities.
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"Serious" donors: Individuals,
organizations, and companies.
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Casual donors: Folks who might play in a golf
tournament or attend a party.
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Non-caregiver volunteers.
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Other funding organizations.
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The potential
Given that the Internet may be the patient's most
important link to the outside world, site design, content, and accessibility
must focus on the patient. If it meets these needs, it should
satisfy the rest of the community as well.
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Allow the community to contribute and interact with
each other via forums.
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Ask the community for suggestions and contributions.
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Implement a process for rapid response to email and
forum questions.
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Create a mailing list process so that we can broadcast
news and notify folks of changes to the site.
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Put the most dynamic information on the home page.
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Publicize and market the site and the site's features
to the local and national community - particularly the forums.
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Create a forums to address the community's knowledge needs
such as equipment swaps.
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What can be done given the
constraints?
The first constraint is inexperience and transience of the
chapter's webmaster. The second constraint is managing the content
and simple publishing for a dynamic website. The third constraint is
the law of diminishing returns.
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Use experienced volunteers to redesign the site to
increase usability, traffic, and manageability.
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Use lowest common denominator design, content
management and publishing technology. First, make
publishing as simple as possible for a chapter employee. Second
make sure that any future volunteer webmaster can understand the
technology. Third, enable volunteer webmasters to publish when
necessary.
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Develop a publishing process for content providers,
editors, and publishers. Of course, one person may do all three
jobs.
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Develop and cultivate a network of experienced
volunteers who can handle complicated publishing issues, questions,
and support during staff transitions.
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Don't expect new staff to become web technology
experts.
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Do expect new staff to understand the site, to
appreciate its value, to learn to take responsibility for the content,
and to follow the publishing procedures.
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Recruit enthusiasts in the community to prepare
content and especially to contribute to forums. Apart from the straight up
value of forums, they allow folks to publish and bypass the webmaster
bottleneck.
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The publisher's proposed
job description
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Read and respond to the email. This ability
needs to be spread around the staff so that someone is always on-call
for predictable email response time..
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Update the calendar / event listings.
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Do periodic SPAMS.
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Manage the forums.
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Check search and site statistics: What are folks
looking at and what are the looking for?
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Maintain relationship with volunteer webmasters.
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Call on volunteer webmasters for advice, significant
changes, and redesign.
So, what did we finally do?
to be continued
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