Building a website can be daunting. Building a growth-driven website can ease your experience and optimize your web presence based on real user data to support your organization’s goals. A redesign doesn’t have to take months of lead-up work or your entire marketing budget. Growth-driven design simplifies the process so you can keep up with trends and your expanding community.
What is Growth-Driven Design?
Growth-driven design is a method for web design used to shorten launch time and easy redesign. It allows continuous, data-based improvement of your site, which keeps you up-to-date in the ever-changing web space. Using growth-driven design to learn from visitor behaviors on your site can improve marketing and impact strategies. It’s a sustainable approach that will alleviate administrative and financial burdens for your organization, leaving you more room to focus on serving your community best.
Benefits of growth-driven design include:
- Fast Launch. You can launch or redesign your website quickly and start using it to serve your community.
- Flexibility. You know your site isn’t done, so you think about what you want to do or add and when. Then you make a plan to build it out.
- Data-Based. All changes you make to your site are based on user data, allowing it to grow and change with your organization and community.
- Budget-Friendly. This design method allows your nonprofit to use its budget to provide the highest impact for your community.
Stages of Growth-Driven Design
Growth-driven design occurs in three stages — strategy, launch pad, and continuous improvement. The goal is to launch the site quickly but make it nimble enough to adjust to your community’s ongoing and changing needs.
1. Strategy
Create a purpose for your website that aligns with your nonprofit’s mission. Strategy is crucial to any website design if you want to impact your community effectively. It includes:
- Goals. Create a clear understanding of your site’s purpose. How do you want to use the site to serve your community?
- Needs. What are visitors trying to do when they visit your site? Understanding their needs will help you better understand how to meet them.
- Audience. Who is the community you’re serving with your site? You can’t know too much about your audience and their needs. They drive every decision you make about your site.
- Fundamental Assumptions. Decide what aspects of your website are most important to your organization’s mission.
- Journey Mapping. Develop the ideal path visitors will take through your site. Be specific about any step they might take. Pay attention to anywhere they might get stuck or frustrated.
- Website-Specific Strategy. Analyze the technology you want to use. Is your existing website working well? Why or why not? What’s working for your competitors? Also, consider SEO strategy, design, and integrations.
- Wish List. Brainstorm what might make your website better for your community. What can you add to bring value to them and reach your organization’s goals?
Digital strategy is more about your community and meeting your engagement goals than it is about the site. Focus on your mission and how you want your website to serve others.
2. Launchpad
A launch pad site is designed to go live as quickly as possible, with room for editing later. You can quickly build a foundation that you can continue to build over time.
4 redesign methods to select from based on your established goals:
- Refresh. If you have built or rebuilt your site in the last six months, your redesign can be a refresh of the base you have.
- Kick Start. Build a website using an existing template.
- 80/20. Use your wish list to decide on the 20% that’s critical now and develop the other 80% over time.
- Launch and Expand. Break your launch down into phases and implement them slowly. Relaunch your highest-impact pages one by one.
3. Continuous Improvement
Your website can always get better. Develop an improvement process as you gather data that you can repeat as you learn, your organization grows, and your community’s needs change. Adopting data-backed continuous improvements helps your organization respond to user needs, feedback, organizational changes, and promotes engagement.
4 steps will help you navigate the continuous improvement process:
- Planning. Choose the area of impact you want to improve on your site and brainstorm ideas for improvement.
- Building. Use technology to implement the strategy you come up with.
- Learning. Analyze metrics to see what changes are working and which ones to revise.
- Transferring. Share what you learn with the rest of your team to begin the process again.
How Can CauseLabs Help?
You never really finish your website. It evolves with your organization in this world of ever-changing technology and trends. The key to a successful website is to be as sustainable as possible. Contact CauseLabs to help you construct a growth plan for your nonprofit’s website based on your audience that will help you build your community.
