What is a non-profit website?
A non-profit website is an online doorway to your non-profit organization, enabling you to raise awareness about your mission. Unlike consumer websites, non-profit websites must make people feel empathy, and instead of building a customer base, build communities of support. The product or service isn’t tangible, so the website must serve as a gateway for inspiration, a platform to share the work, stories, and impact that connect us and provide clear pathways to action. Donors, staff, volunteers, communities, partners, and funders converge on a non-profit website making the strategy behind them even more important.
How do we design websites for nonprofit organizations?
Discovery
We think critically about how you want to portray your organization online, identifying critical goals for the architecture, platform, design and integrations. We dive into your core audiences, engaging them through surveys and activities – learning about their motivations, goals, frustrations and sensitivities – a resulting website brief outlines the strategy.
Site Navigation
Centring the needs of the audience groups and your organization’s goals forms the basis for a navigation approach. Content topics are organized into an interactive sitemap, and menu designs are proposed. Together we revise and validate the sitemap to ensure it will result in effective user flows.
Style Guide
A style guide outlines the visual assets and elements that form the foundation for a website and express how your organization’s brand and content may come to life online. A style guide includes colour prompts with accessible contrast ratios, heading styles, buttons and link styles, cards and grids, and guidelines for photography and video. These elements are organized onto a sample homepage mockup, helping you to visualize the future website.
Mockups
Mockups combine the sitemap and style guide, outlining each page type’s design and the content flow on your non-profit website. At this stage, you can interact with a visual prototype of your website, clicking through pages and sections, all with the freedom to provide input and feedback as we iterate the design until it’s pixel-perfect.
Content
Content is where the written and media resources are assembled. Whether your non-profit engages a copywriter or develops content in-house, you will be provided with templates, including tips and prompts, to ensure content is clear, concise and optimized.
Developing The Framework
Your new website will be built on WordPress using an accessible visual builder framework as a foundation. This fast, SEO-optimized framework provides a high level of flexibility in design and scalability. Each website includes a toolbox of custom-designed rows and modules, which are responsive, and empower you to easily edit pages or quickly assemble new pages using a quick-to-learn drag-and-drop interface.
Pages & Posts
All finalized website copy will be filled from content templates onto the WordPress website, news, blogs, and events may be migrated, and custom functionalities and interactions will be connected, such as donation forms and CRM integrations.
QA & Launch
The website is built. The content is in. Everything is connected and running smoothly. Now it’s time to get testing. Your team will be granted access to a fully functioning staging website on a staging server where you can test the flow, content, and media and request changes. Meanwhile, the Loop team will conduct cross-device, browser, and accessibility tests to ensure compliance. Page metadata and alt text are implemented, and a redirection map is developed before launch. Upon completion, the website can be launched! Hooray!
Training
Ensuring you have the skills and tools to manage your website is important to us. Together your team will be granted access to the website backend and provided with a comprehensive set-by-step guide and digital training session. Need ongoing support? We offer flexible retainer and maintenance support for all websites that we build.
Training
We set up your WordPress user accounts and provide a tutorial on updating and maintaining the website. We also provide a short documentation guide for your team to ensure a basic how-to guide is available for staff who will update the site.
Timeframe:
- 3 months
What You Get::
- Discovery activities
- Website brief
- Website style guide
- Mockups
- Content templates
- Custom WordPress theme
- Integrations
- QA process
- Launch
- Training and ongoing support
”Our experience working with Loop was fantastic. The whole team was friendly, consistent, and really committed to bringing our vision to life. From start to finish, we really felt like it was a collaborative process, and everyone on our team commented on how much they enjoyed working with an agency that was so flexible, insightful, and skilled. We felt valued, supportive, and heard throughout the project.
Ally Crockford, Righting Relations
