Your website is the digital marketing hub of your nonprofit organization and it should express what you’re all about in a way that inspires your audience to take action. It should be easily navigable, flawlessly operable, and have a look that makes people stop and take notice.
Nonprofit Web Design Services
Strategy
No one just builds a website for the sake of building a website. It’s important to know what you want your website to accomplish and understand how you’re going to get there. And to do this, you need to implement the right strategy before you do anything else.
SEO
If your site is being buried in the depths of Google, your audience simply isn’t going to find it. And if your site wasn’t built with SEO practices in mind, it might be too late and time for an overhaul. With a website with proper foundations for search engine optimizations, your website can grow with you to best serve users seeking your services and therefore, improve the value of your results.
Information Architecture
Information architecture is the process of determining how information on your site will be structured and housed. By understanding what your audience wants and needs from your site, you’ll be able to create a proper sitemap and strategies to get your site visitors the information they need.
Content Strategy
You likely have no shortage of information you’d like featured on your site, but you’ll want to first consider user experience, lead generation, organic SEO, and more. This is where a solid content strategy comes in. If you’re not spending a good amount of time, research, and effort on your content strategy, visitors to your site won’t know where to begin.
Copywriting
Get your audience know what your organization is all about. Tell your story like only you can. Compelling and informative copy is what’s going to set you apart from the pack and inspire your site’s visitors.
UI/UX Design
User experience (UX) and user interface (UI) are huge considerations to take, as they pertain to how users interact with your website. With good UX and UI design, users navigate through your website with clear paths to convert.
Responsive Design
Your site is going to be accessed from all types of devices—phones, tablets, desktops, laptops, etc. By implementing a responsive design, you’re ensuring that your site will look great and operate without issue no matter how it is accessed.
Visual Design
If your site doesn’t have the right look and doesn’t draw in your visitors, you’re going to miss out on opportunities. This is why we make visual design an integral part of the building process. If your website isn’t creating a great first impression, you’ll have a hard time playing catch up.
Mobile-First Mindset
Yes, your site needs to look amazing on a desktop or laptop. But keep in mind that many of your site’s visitors will only ever see your site from their mobile device (and it had better look good). Find an agency that will be just as focused on your organization’s mobile design.
Web Development
Web development can be a nebulous term, so we’ll crystalize it for you: We’re talking about full-stack development with a custom content management system. We make sure that your nonprofit’s website looks good on the front end and the back end, and that it’s usable by you and your team.
Superior Performance
You can hire the best designers to tackle the look of your nonprofit organization’s site, but unless it’s running smoothly and performing just as you need it to, the design is irrelevant. In addition to a thorough Quality Assurance process during each step in our web design process, we test each site thoroughly for speed, accessibility, performance and reliability.
Analytics
In order to ensure your site is performing as planned, we have to understand how users are interacting with it. Analytics allow us valuable insight into the behaviors of those who visit your site—important information that we’ll apply to every step of your digital strategy.
Results Monitoring
After designing a website to help your organization effectively communicate with key audiences, it’s time to monitor the results of your website. It’s our goal to not only report on the results your new website is generating, but also make proactive recommendations for ways to optimize the site to consistently improve results.
Website Maintenance
We know that things can come up after the launch of your nonprofit organization’s website—copy changes or edits, new photos or blog posts, updates to your CMS or plugins, just to name a few. That’s why all of our new website projects include a year of maintenance, with the option to renew year after year. It’s our intention to partner with you throughout the construction of your new website, but also afterward.
How to Find the Right Nonprofit Organization Website Design Agency
Building a website takes time, effort, collaboration, creativity, and a lot of patience. And it’s important that you’re comfortable with the nonprofit marketing agency you pick to lead you through this long and often complicated process. So how do you find the right team? Here are a few tips to help you find the perfect website design agency:
Look for an agency that:
Acts as a partner to your organization
The right agency won’t leave you to handle the gruntwork. And they won’t leave you in the dark as they forge ahead. The right agency will be a partner to your organization, guiding and advising you throughout the planning , development, and launching processes. It’s important to know what you want to achieve with your website and to find the team that can best help you reach these goals.
Doesn’t outsource their work
Yes, even agencies that claim to be “full service” may outsource certain aspects of your site. And having too many cooks in the kitchen can soil the lines of communication and severely delay the process. Find a team that works together day in and day out to deliver a product that is second to none.
Follows best practices
You’ll find no shortage of website design agencies who claim to “follow best practices,” but not everyone can define that. When deciding between agencies, it’s okay to inquire about their best practices and learn exactly what that means to them. The right agency should be able to define the term as well as give you plenty of specific examples relating to their own experience.
Approaches Design Strategically
Your website might look great, but if it’s not easily navigable, operable, and churning traffic, nothing else matters. Find an agency that approaches design with an end goal in mind.
What you can do to prepare for your search:
Know Your Budget
Websites come in all shapes and sizes (and price points). So you’ll want to have a general idea of what you’re willing to spend in order to get the website your organization deserves. Keep in mind, a well-built website should last you several years and will serve as the central point of your digital marketing identity. In other words, it’s not something on which you’ll want to cut corners or cheapen. Make sure your range is flexible and realistic to both you and your agency.
Look At Their Work
You’ll want to check out some of the other sites your agency of choice has designed (especially the nonprofit sites). This should give you a general idea of whether or not the agency’s views are in line with your own as well as how they approach design.
Read Their Reviews
Before sitting down with an agency to talk shop, visit their site and see what other organizations have said about the work they provide. And while you’ll certainly want to see the reviews on the agency’s site, make sure to investigate Google reviews as well as these tend to be more unfiltered and honest.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are nonprofit organization websites so expensive?
A website is a major investment simply because of the time, effort, and creativity it takes to bring it to life. You can certainly build a cheap website from a discount developer or DIY service, but chances are that it won’t help you achieve your goals. In order to build a website that truly represents your organization, inspires your visitors, and operates flawlessly every time, it takes a fair financial investment. As is the case with everything in this world, you get what you pay for.
How can you ensure you get a good ROI on your nonprofit organization’s website?
You already know the goals of your nonprofit organization and your website should be designed to help you achieve these goals. Your agency of choice can help guide this process as well as lay out the relevant data and analytics as far as how your audience is accessing and responding to your website. No matter the direction in which you wish to take your organization, a thorough and well-built website should support you in getting there.
Our Awards
St. Louis Business Journal
St. Louis’ Largest Advertising, Marketing, and PR Firms
St. Louis Small Business Monthly
Best Marketing Firm
St. Louis Small Business Monthly
Best in Web Design
St. Louis Small Business Monthly
Best in Customer Service
Why You Should Work With Us
Why should you work with Timmermann Group for your new website? Because we’re the best. But don’t just take our word for it: In 2019, we had the honor of being named Best Marketing Firm by St. Louis Small Business Monthly. We were also nominated for Best in Web Design and Best in Customer Service. These are honors we don’t take lightly.
We take a custom and strategic approach to every website design, and every step of the process is meticulously planned out by our in-house team of developers, designers, strategists, and branding experts. Nothing is outsourced and nothing is overlooked. And, if we’re being honest, we love doing it. It’s more than a job; it’s our passion. Staying at the forefront of web design trends and tactics, our team aims to create a website that exceeds every one of your expectations and serves as an exemplary marketing and communications tool for your business.
Learn More About Nonprofit Website Design
Nonprofit website design is one of the most important, impactful, and cost-effective methods for a nonprofit organization to accomplish its goals and to fulfill its mission. Your website provides you with the opportunity to tell your organization’s story in a compelling manner, engage and build meaningful connections with your target audiences, and to successfully compel each audience to take appropriate further action–including requesting service, registering to volunteer, and making donations to support your organization’s mission.
The typical major obstacle to a successful nonprofit website is a concern about budgets. This is certainly understandable, considering the tight financial constraints in which so many nonprofit organizations operate. However, it is useful to approach your new nonprofit website design project not as a cost or line-item expense, but rather as a long-term investment in your organization’s ability to serve the community. This is more than just semantics or a shift in mindset. In today’s digital world, it’s a necessity. Your nonprofit website is where many users will first become aware of your nonprofit, it is where they will learn about the services you provide and how those benefit and improve the community, and it is where and how they will choose whether to take action to support your organization and cause. As such, make sure that you aren’t simply searching for the cheapest solution to your nonprofit website design project, but rather that you are searching for the best solution.
An early step in successful nonprofit website design is identifying the various audiences that your website needs to communicate with: these will likely include individuals and families who would benefit from your organization’s services, individual donors, corporate and high net worth donors, volunteers, potential employees, and perhaps others. As you identify each of these audiences or user personas, think about what types of information and content will connect and resonate with each. Then, also think about what types of content would be most effective to reach each type of user. For example, an infographic that explains the process in which your organization helps people might be the best way to engage with people who need your help. A well-produced video that showcases real success stories could be the perfect way to connect with donors, provide evidence of your nonprofit’s success, and encourage them to financially support your mission.
Creating amazing content ensures that your website properly and compellingly tells your nonprofit organization’s story. Remember that your nonprofit website is telling that story all the time. You never know when someone might visit your website, or how they were directed there. Thus, user awareness will vary from having zero prior knowledge of your nonprofit organization all the way to full awareness as someone who already volunteers, donates, or receives assistance. Your content offerings, therefore, should include information that explains and educates, as well as information that entices action. Users who have little or no knowledge of your organization’s mission and services will likely need to learn more about you before they feel comfortable engaging further, while other users visit your site have already determined that they would like to donate or volunteer. Crafting content for all types of users, for all levels of awareness and knowledge, is crucial for truly effective nonprofit website design.
To further entice users to take action, and to make your organization’s investment in a new nonprofit website as effective as possible, you also need to determine how each various audience or type of user will interact with your website. Often referred to as user journeys or user pathways, the purpose here is to map out the desired steps that each type of user will take on your website, and then through a combination of content, visual design, and calls-to-action lay out a roadmap to get there. This is a very important aspect of nonprofit website design, but unfortunately is also one of the most commonly overlooked. Working with a digital marketing agency partner that has experience with successful nonprofit website design projects is a good way to make sure that this is incorporated into your digital marketing strategy.
Your new nonprofit website design project should be viewed as a marketing hub to which all of your organization’s other marketing efforts can direct people, further enhancing its utility to your organization. This aids not only engagement with users but also brings greater visibility and accountability to each of your individual marketing efforts, both online and offline. One of the best things about digital marketing is the ability to track and measure a multitude of data points, and to then analyze this data into actionable insights and recommendations about how to further optimize your nonprofit website design and other marketing efforts in the future. Your marketing agency partner will be able to help you determine which data points to track, and how to properly analyze and leverage this information to make optimal decisions.
Embarking on a new nonprofit website design project is a significant undertaking, but it needn’t be a daunting one. Working with a marketing agency partner to develop a strategic plan that focuses on your organization’s goals will help ensure that the investment you are making is a sound one, and one that pays dividends for years to come.