A great arts non-profit website gives your audience a smooth experience, making it easy to buy tickets, make donations, and get involved with your organisation.
When thinking about how to create a website for a non-profit organisation, the critical first step is to understand your needs and the needs of your audience, so you can define exactly what the project is. You need to be able to communicate your vision clearly to prospective web developers as well as your team.
Explore your current customer journey
Take a moment to evaluate your current website from a human perspective. Go through every process that you’re expecting your audience to take, as if you’re brand new to your site, and make a note of:
- What feels great and is working well?
- What’s currently broken?
- What’s confusing?
- What’s creating friction? Where are you getting caught up?
Even better, get someone who hasn’t interacted with your website before to go through this online journey. Ask them to perform specific actions like adding a ticket to the basket or making a donation. Is their experience different from yours?
Gather quantitative data on your existing site
If you already have a website, your data is a gold mine that can help you understand your site’s strengths and weaknesses, and how they affect your goals.
Use the reporting tools already at your disposal to pull data that shows how your website is performing right now. This could come from:
- Google Analytics
- Google Search Console
- Your ticketing software
As a starting point, try to answer these questions:
- How many site visits do you get per month?
- How many successful monthly sales and donations do you receive online?
- Which pages of your website are visited the most?
- How many transactions are happening online versus over the phone or in person?
- What devices is your audience using to complete transactions?
- What sources are sending traffic to your website?
If you don’t know how to find the answers to these questions, that’s okay. A great goal for your website project would be to have clear reporting that your team knows how to access.
Look for any patterns in your data. Are you receiving a lot of site visits, but not making many sales? Are a lot of people coming to your site via email, but not through search? Be on the lookout for any points of contrast – they could be prime opportunities.
To establish a benchmark, you can compare your own data month to month, or year to year, depending on how your programming works. You can then compare that with the performance of websites in the cultural sector. Our friends at Substrakt publish a regular website benchmark report that gives valuable context.
Research examples of arts non-profit website design
It’s time to get inspired. Look at as many different websites as you can, both for organisations very similar to yours as well as organisations that are a little different.
We’ve bookmarked some of our favourite event website examples for you – but a great website doesn’t have to cost the earth. Look at a range of examples, from free sites to bespoke, integrated options, to assess what really matters to you and your audiences.
It’s especially important to look at your “competitors” and what they’re doing. Here, that means any organisation that serves a similar need or audience – not that you’re actively competing with them. This could be other local organisations in your area, other venues that put on similar shows to yours, or other organisations with a similar mission. If you’re a museum, look at the websites for other museums, and if you’re a theatre, look at other theatres.
For every website, consider:
- What do you love about this website, and why?
- What ideas do you want to borrow from this website?
- What problems are you trying to solve that this website handles well?
- What parts of this website aren’t working for you? What would you leave behind?
- How is this website delivering a great customer experience?
Brainstorm your team’s needs
At this step, you should be talking with all the different departments that use your website for their needs – from marketing to development to ticket sales.
Pro tip: If you have a lot of voices in the room, it may help to do some affinity mapping.
Have everyone write their ideas and needs on sticky notes. You can do this virtually using a tool like Miro. Work together to go through each sticky note and place them on a board. Start placing similar sticky notes next to each other. Formally group the sticky notes into themes. This will give you an idea of what’s coming up again and again.
From there, you can organise your key ideas by importance:
- Critical and urgent – the absolute must-haves for your organisation to be able to function.
- High priority – what do you really want?
- Nice to have – these can be ideas that will take your site to the next level, but if you don’t get them, it won’t be a deal breaker.
- Moonshot – in a perfect world, with no constraints, what would your website be able to do?
Everyone will come to the table with a different priority, but remember to focus on what your audience needs.
Assign a point person to the project
Especially if you work in a large organisation, it can be really helpful to decide on one person to lead your website project. If you’re reading this, maybe your team has already decided it’s you.
Being the point person does not mean being solely responsible for the website. This person should have the latitude to bring people in and delegate as needed.
The value here is giving them the clarity and momentum to keep the project moving forward. Plus, it creates a clear point of contact for any external providers or internal stakeholders.
For advice on managing website projects, check out the top project management tips from our partners at Supercool.
Set your budget and scope
With all your ideas mapped out, you should be getting a picture of what you want from your non-profit website. Now it’s time to start nailing down the boundaries of the project:
- How would you characterise this project? Some options could be:
- Starting from scratch with a brand new website or total overhaul.
- Brand refresh that changes the look and feel of the website but keeps the same functionality.
- Update to your site’s functionality while keeping the same branding and copy.
- Light-touch improvements, with one or two targeted changes.
- Adding pages, functions, or areas but leaving the existing site as is.
- What are you able to do on your own, and what requires a web developer?
- What budget is available for the project?
- What is the project timeline?
- For example, do you absolutely need to have it done before your busy season kicks off in the autumn?
- What other constraints does the project have?
Iterate on what the project will look like. Maybe you’ll realise that you don’t have enough time or budget to do all the things you’ve marked as critical or high priority. It’s okay to make adjustments, whether that means re-evaluating the priorities of the project or going to your leadership team to make a case for more time or budget.
Think strategically about balancing your resources. Prioritise customisations and flexibility in the parts of your website where you can have the most impact, and lean on simpler or more standardised solutions in the less significant areas. Talk to your web agency or developer about what’s possible, and make sure they understand how your box office and fundraising teams work.
Write a brief
A clear, written brief is the key to a successful event website design project. The good news is that by doing the steps above, you should be in great shape to write one.
A great brief includes:
- An explicit goal – this helps anyone using it understand how to apply their expertise toward getting you to this finish line.
- Transparency on timeline, budget, and requirements – if there’s an expectation that you have for the project, write it down.
- Links to resources or examples – for example, if you already have a style guide or a website that you really want to emulate.
Start with a brief template: Our friends at the web design company Splitpixel have already set you off in the right direction with a fantastic, free downloadable eBook template to walk arts and culture organisations through how to write a brief.
Get internal approval of your brief
Your brief is a great resource for communicating with internal stakeholders. It gives them a strong jumping-off point to tell you what they like or what they would want changed.
You know your organisation better than anyone, so make your best judgment on when and how often to update your internal stakeholders. If you have a complex organisation, it’s best to include critical stakeholders as early as possible.
Before you start sourcing web developers, you need the green light from the right people in your organisation. That helps you avoid a situation where you source the right web developer, then have to pull out or drastically change the scope of the project.
Find website developers for the arts
While there are plenty of simple arts website solutions, if the project you’ve scoped out is customised or intricate, you will want to work with a web developer.
We recommend working with an agency that already has experience with the arts sector. The right web developer for your non-profit website will have the technical expertise to create a website, along with a strong understanding of the needs and challenges of arts organisations.
- Explore web agencies on the Spektrix Partner Directory. You’ll find a catalogue of web developers with experience in the arts. Many of our partners can save you time and budget with pre-built integrations that connect your website to your CRM and ticketing system.
- Get in touch with agencies that have built your favourite websites. Go back to the examples you pulled out in your research. Usually, you can find the developer’s name and a link to their portfolio in the footer of the homepage. Alternatively, you can get in touch with the organisation and ask them who created their website and what the experience was like.
From here, you can confidently work toward your specific goals with a trusted expert.
Your website matters
We get it – improving, building, or revamping an arts non-profit website can feel like an enormous undertaking. But by following these steps at the beginning of your project, you can work efficiently and strategically to create an invaluable resource for your organisation and your audience.
Remember, accessibility is a core part of any successful non-profit website, and our guide to website accessibility best practices shares practical steps to make your site easier for everyone to use.
If you ever need support or advice, get in touch with our team. We’re always happy to consult with you or recommend a partner.
