Start with three questions. What are your organisation’s goals for the next 12 months? What do you need the website to do to support those goals? And who are you trying to reach?
Know your audiences. Most nonprofits have three to five distinct audience groups: donors, volunteers, beneficiaries, partners, and the general public. Each group comes to your site with different needs and different questions. A donor wants to know their money will be well used. A potential volunteer wants to know what’s involved. A beneficiary wants to access your services. Your site needs to serve all of them — which usually means clear navigation and audience-aware content, not a single homepage that tries to speak to everyone at once.
Create simple personas. You don’t need a 10-page persona document. A paragraph per audience — who they are, what they need from you, what would make them take action — is enough to guide your decisions. In our experience, the nonprofits that skip this step end up with websites that reflect their internal structure rather than their audience’s needs.
