The Impact of Knowing Your Website Audience

This post was updated on January 23, 2026 to reflect current best practices for audience research and persona development.

The start of a new website project can be messy, confusing and stressful. But there’s one thing I’ve found helpful in answering every single question that comes up through the website project: knowing who your website audience is.

Who are you targeting with the new site? And what do they want?

Once you know your target audience for the new site, many of the other facets of your project seem to fall into place.

How Do You Determine Your Website Audience?

Start by answering a few foundational questions about who you’re trying to reach and what they need. This should take no more than an hour, but it will inform nearly every decision you make throughout your website project.

Here are the key questions to work through:

• What are you trying to accomplish with the website?
• Who needs to visit the website in order for you to accomplish these things?
• What are those visitors trying to accomplish when they arrive?
• What obstacles or frustrations might prevent them from achieving their goals on your site?
• How familiar are they with your organization and the problem you solve?
• What would motivate them to take the action you want?

If you have multiple audiences, like volunteers, donors, clients or advocates, you can repeat these questions for each. But try to be selective, tailoring your site to the audience most likely to help your organization fulfill the goals you’ve outlined for the site.

Should You Create Audience Personas?

Audience personas remain one of the most effective tools for keeping your website focused on real user needs. A target audience persona (a fictitious person representing a specific section of your website audience) ensures your audience stays top of mind throughout the project and beyond.

One thing to keep in mind: effective personas should emphasize behaviors, goals and pain points rather than demographics alone. As the Interaction Design Foundation explains, “Demographics, such as age, job and education, provide context, but they don’t explain how people behave. Designers build effective personas with observed behaviors and motivations, not assumptions.”

In practical terms, this means asking questions like “What is this person trying to accomplish?” and “What obstacles stand in their way?” will often be more useful than focusing on age ranges or income levels.

Consider creating distinct personas for each major audience type (donors, volunteers, beneficiaries and advocates) since each group comes to your site with different motivations and needs.

How Does Your Website Audience Impact Your Project?

A predefined audience should have a starring role in every single website decision. Your website audience, along with their needs and preferences, impacts decisions from start to finish.

Features and Functionality

Knowing your audience will help you identify the key features your site must include. What will your target audience need to be able to do on your website? That may include things like online donations directly on your site, email sign-ups, a volunteer management system and event registrations.

You may have grand dreams to incorporate all kinds of bells and whistles into your site. Narrowing the scope to those features most likely to appeal to your key audience will help you hone in on the “need-to-have” features.

You can always incorporate the “nice-to-have” features down the road, but it’s helpful to know what’s necessary to start. This is especially true if you need to make cuts for budget, time or capacity reasons.

Design

Identifying the audience you’re designing for will help determine the best look and feel of your new site. For example, you’d likely take a different approach to appeal to middle school students than you would corporate donors. This has implications for many elements, including photos, colors, font size and style and overall layout.

Knowing your audience also dictates your accessibility standards. If your primary donors are older adults, high-contrast colors and larger default font sizes are more than just “design choices”. They’re requirements for usability.

Beyond visual appeal and accessibility, consider how your audience will access your site. The 2025 M+R Benchmarks study found that 53% of nonprofit website traffic now comes from mobile devices. However, desktop users still account for 70% of online donation revenue, with the average desktop gift ($145) nearly double the average mobile gift ($76). Understanding how your specific audience browses and takes action can help you decide where to focus your design efforts.

Navigation

Once you’ve identified the primary target audience for your website, you can prioritize the content these folks will be looking for. Your navigation, or website structure, should be intuitive and easy to use regardless of your primary audience.

But when you’re trying to decide what pieces of content to give a more prominent placement, lean toward the information your primary audience will be seeking. Consider using one of these common nonprofit website structures as a starting point and customizing it to work for your audience.

Content

If you know who your audience is and what they’re looking for, you can create content catered to their expectations. While you generally want to write in a conversational tone, it’s important to tailor this to your audience as well.

For instance, you’ll likely write differently for kids than you would for adults in academia. By knowing who your visitors will likely be, you can deliver the content they’re looking for in a way that they’ll find engaging and accessible.

See our tips for developing your nonprofit’s voice and striking the right tone on each page of your site.

Driving Traffic

Considering the intended audience for your site is especially important in efforts to drive traffic to your new site. You’ll want to ensure you’re attracting the right people who will engage with your new site and take action for your nonprofit.

• If you’d like to drive traffic from search engines, you’ll need to use keywords your target audience will type into those search engines.
• If you’re looking to attract folks with little familiarity with your mission, you’ll want to avoid any jargon they may not know within your website content.
• If you’re trying to draw visitors with an in-depth knowledge of your area of expertise, some industry-specific terminology will likely be more appropriate.

It’s also important to consider your target audience to determine the best way to drive traffic by way of links. Referral traffic, or visits from people clicking links, can be a huge boost to your overall website traffic. This can include industry-specific blogs, forums, social media channels and related websites. You need to know who you’re trying to drive to your website before determining the best way to do so.

How Can You Learn More About Your Audience?

If you don’t yet have a clear picture of your audience, that’s okay. The good news is that you don’t need expensive tools or a large research budget to understand them. Here are practical ways to gather insights before and during your website project:

Talk to the people you serve. Even a handful of informal conversations with current supporters, volunteers or program participants can reveal patterns in what they care about and how they talk about your work. Ask open-ended questions like “What made you first get involved with us?” or “What would make it easier for you to [donate/volunteer/find information]?”

Survey your existing community. Tools like SurveyMonkey (which offers a 25% nonprofit discount) or Typeform (40% off for nonprofits) make it easy to gather structured feedback from your email list or social media followers.

Review what you already know. Your team likely has valuable insights from years of interacting with supporters. Gather staff members who work directly with your audiences and capture what they’ve learned about common questions, frustrations and motivations.

Look at your current website data. If you have Google Analytics set up on your existing site, review which pages get the most traffic and where visitors tend to drop off. This can reveal what your audience is looking for and where your current site may be falling short.

Key Takeaways

• Start with foundational questions. Understanding what you’re trying to accomplish and who needs to visit helps every other decision fall into place.
• Focus personas on behaviors and goals. What someone is trying to accomplish matters more than demographic details alone.
• Know how your audience will access your site. Mobile and desktop users behave differently, so understanding your audience’s habits can help you prioritize your design efforts.
• Gather audience insights through conversation. Informal interviews, surveys and staff knowledge can be just as valuable as expensive research tools.
• Let your audience guide content and keywords. The words your audience uses should be the words on your website.

Knowing your website audience is crucial to building a successful nonprofit website with the power to move your mission forward and achieve your organization’s goals. As you work through each step of the project, keep your audience front and center in every decision you make to ensure a website that drives results.

Have you defined the target audience for your nonprofit’s website? If so, how’d you go about doing it? Were there any decisions you made (or wish you’d made) based on your audience? As always, I’d love to hear from you in the comments.