Inside Charity


Usability for the Non-profit Site

By: Virginia McKendry, PhD
September, 2000

OK. You've done everything by the book. You're savvy to how the Internet is changing the face of private and corporate giving. You've begged your board to allot part of this year's budget to developing an online presence. You've learned HTML and spent hours huddled with graphic designers and programmers to create a 21st-century web site that will blow the competition out of the water.

But your visitors are not returning, and frequent "hits" don't generate the online donations you projected. Non-profit web developer, you have a usability problem! And I'll bet you five non-profit bucks that you forgot to put your audience at the centre of your design equation.

What is usability?

Simply put, a usable site is one designed to meet the user's needs and expectations.

However strong a presence your non-profit has in the larger community, the success of your web site will rest on how well it addresses usability issues.

Like their for-profit cousins, charities must creatively address the fact that the Internet empowers online users to experience your service before they transact with you, instead of after they've talked with you or made a donation. To make and keep a customer for life, charities must now make it enjoyable and easy for the potential online donor to give, as well as locate relevant information. It may be true that users may be more forgiving of charities whose sites give them trouble, based on an understanding that non-profits have fewer resources than their corporate counterparts. But that patience may wear thin as time goes on, and they get accustomed to using sites that are a breeze to navigate. Additionally, remember too that your users' experience also affects your overall brand.

In the long term, ensuring a positive online experience for your donors is the only way to keep them coming back to your site. It's also a relatively easy way of differentiating your cause from the hundreds of thousands of credible causes currently competing for your donors' attention and loyal.

What makes a site usable?

A truly usable site begins by anticipating the generic obstacles facing your user before she or he even gets online, never mind to your site! Make sure your site design consider such issues as:

donor base's general level of web knowledge

type of operating system, amount of memory, and processor speed

browser type, browser version, browser resolution, modem speed, bandwidth availability

accessibility, in terms of font size, ALT tags, colour blindness, language, and other issues

printing needs - will people need to get hard copies of your content?

Once you've tangled with those questions, you're ready to get down to the specifics of your own site. If you do nothing else toward making your site usable, ask yourself, "Why are we publishing a public web site, and why do we think people will want to visit our site?" These two related questions will provide a benchmark for measuring success and decision-making throughout the planning, implementation and maintenance phases of your web site.

For optimum usability, your site needs to mesh the dual goals of meeting your organization's needs as well as those of your site's visitors. Once you've become clear on what your organizational goals are, and have established a goals and preferences profile for each key segment of your donor base, you have solid information in which to ground your site's architecture, navigation, functionality and graphic design rationale.

Jesse Garret's site provides a great visual tool, available at www.jjg.net/ia, to help people think about usability. Take a look - it gives a coherent overview of the interrelated elements that contribute to the overall user experience:

site objectives and user objectives, to design site in terms of internal and external goals

functional and content requirements, to meet user online needs

information architecture and interaction design, for intuitive access and ease of use

interface and information design, for easy navigation and spatial context

visual design, to enhance branding and to provide a pleasurable aesthetic experience

Most importantly, Garret's model suggests how risky it is to design your site without a clear understanding of your own goals and what your users will want to see and accomplish when they visit your site.

What Should Non-Profits Keep in Mind?

For most charities, donor demographics and preferences will be similar, and your own experience on the web can help you decide what your users will want to do and see when they come to your site. As you ponder these issues, don't feel you have to reinvent the wheel.

When I asked David Folk, Executive Assistant at ChildFind Alberta and in-house designer/developer of their site at www.childfind.ab.ca, if he had any tips for Charity.ca readers, his answer echoed that of every usability how-to I've encountered so far: "Keep it simple. Given that most of us are out there to help, why make it more difficult by designing a frustrating site that no one can navigate." He went on to explain how the personal online experiences of their office staff led to this usability manifesto: "...to offer valuable information to families and to make that information as accessible as possible." This meant making sure that the site provides content and graphic design appropriate to a family audience and family life, as well as a navigation scheme that makes getting around the site a breeze.

Many non-profits share the business goal of increasing public awareness while maintaining or reducing administration costs. To meet that goal, you need to make site content accessible and easy to download. Depending on where and who they are, users may be using no more than a dial-up 28.8 modem and an older computer with older browser versions and relatively low screen resolution.

Nothing will drive your visitors away faster than a site that forces users to download massive files and whose graphic-heavy animated content results in pages that take longer than 8 seconds to load.

As Elizabeth Brubaker, Executive Director of Environment Probe (www.environomentprobe.org) notes, in regard to her organization's site objectives, "We were primarily interested in a comprehensive presentation of our publications, but also our campaigns, media appearances, and so on." Ms. Brubaker and graphic designer Liz Rentzelo worked hard at planning a site design that was "logical, simple and clear." As a result, Environment Probe's site provides a pleasurable experience for the user, largely because of the thought that went into the site before development: "Visually, we wanted [the site] to be attractive and coherent...and to work on different sized screens and in different programs."

Similarly, Childfind Alberta designed their site's information architecture and content to help their users easily navigate through masses of content to find the information they need. David Folk's awareness of usability issues means that the site's content is presented for users increasingly accustomed to scanning for relevant information: "We have a very text intensive site and so I felt it was necessary to break the info down into easily manageable portions. As well, using the inverted pyramid also helps the browser as he/she doesn't have to read a bunch of info they aren't interested in before they get to what they want to know about."

A non-profit's success depends on public awareness. Make your web site a place where people can find the information they want, when they want it, without having to wade through long paragraphs and header-less text. A plethora of resources for the web writer are available at the resource web sites listed at the end of this article.

Making it Easy and Safe to Give

Once you've got your users' information needs satisfied, it's time to think about the other key motive for their visit - donating money, the lifeblood of your organization. You're going to want to make that a no-brainer for anyone and everyone who comes to your site.

A site designed to enable secure online donations is a site that meets the dual goals of non-profits and their audiences. While prominent "Give Now" buttons may offend the more restrained Canadian non-profit sensibility, it's really important to provide this option to your users.

Remember, other organizations are already making it easy to give online. Sites that are not enabled for digital donations should seriously reconsider their online strategy, or contract with an appropriate entity like Charity.ca that provides users with this functionality for a very low share of the transaction. It's all about giving your users as many chances as possible to give you that precious non-profit dollar.

Both Childfind Alberta and Environment Probe provide online donation functionality on their sites. Importantly, users can access the online donation form from anywhere on the site, regardless of other use goals. In my view, it was this aspect of these sites that makes them truly usable, and that prompted me to include them in this article.

A satisfying online giving experience occurs within an atmosphere of trust, using forms and other tools that provide the user with choices about how, when and to what cause they wish to contribute. Any design time spent on designing a neat, speedy, and secure transaction environment should be counted as an investment in the future success of your site.

Remember too, users are becoming increasingly sensitive about how online databases of user information are handled. Be sure to provide assurances that sensitive user information will be not be sold to a third party or used for any other purpose.

What can I do in the meantime?

Designing for usability requires thinking, imagination and observation, and trying out new approaches. This means that any motivated non-profit can implement its own usability design and testing without spending thousands of dollars on expert consultation. If you're currently shopping around for a web developer, make sure they know how to talk about usability, and can show you how they practice what they preach.

At the end of this article, I've provided links to sites that will give you good information about how to conduct your own usability tests, using both low and high tech methods. Use this information to plan your own testing, and to make a case for allocating resources to usability testing in next year's web site budget.

What if you've already got the site up and running, and there's no funding for a major upgrade for another six months? In my experience as a web strategist for both business and the non-profit sector, the devil continues to dwell in the details. Thankfully, the Society for Technical Communication offers a list of usability problems ranked by their degree of severity. You can get it at http://stc.org/pics/usability/resources/index.html.

Both Childfind Alberta and Environment Probe constantly seek ways to improve their site. David Folk is clearing up some typos that he missed on the first go-round, and he also is aware of the need to upgrade the graphical elements so that the site can compete visually with other non-profits. At Environment Probe, Elizabeth Brubaker will be seeking to add more dynamic content from outside sources, in order to strengthen EnvironmentProbe.org's offerings.

Here are a number of options you may want to consider, depending on your budget and the severity of the usability problems:

correct all typos and broken links on your site

check all your content to make sure text is easy to scan and graphics are quick to load

create a link on the index page so users can skip Flash intros and splash pages if they wish

create ALT tags that will allow people with text-only browsers to see what

the graphic signifies

make sure that your most important navigation is available in HTML links, not only graphics

include a highly visible link to your privacy policy on every page of your site

if you don't have a way to allow your donors to donate online, contract with Charity.ca to use their online donation mechanism, and post their Donate button on every page of your site

make sure donors can contact you via phone, email and mail and that you respond to all queries

if the site is hopelessly flawed, consider using Charity.ca's services until the next site upgrade

Ultimately, designing your site for usability enhances the validity of your organization in the larger context of the charitable landscape. A good user experience leads to more online donations and a stronger relationship the people who make your programs possible. Properly planned, it establishes a learning relationship with your donor base that in turn helps you offer even more satisfying experiences that keeps them coming back.

A dollar spent on usability is the most cost-effective way to keep your donors coming back to your site over their lifetime. So keep it informative, keep a handle on the animated graphics, and remember, on the Web, Less is More.

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