Nonprofit Capacity Building: 4 Ways to Create Capacity With Your Website

Does it feel like there just aren’t enough hours in the day to tackle everything on your ever-growing to-do list? Nonprofit capacity building is important for just about all nonprofit marketers we know, but it typically doesn’t come naturally. It’s easy to add new initiatives to your nonprofit’s marketing plan without considering the time and effort that it takes — which is one of the reasons why burnout is so common among nonprofit staff.

It’s a lot harder to think strategically about the initiatives that will power growth and how new ideas fit in with everything that you already have going. Especially with small teams and marketers wearing multiple hats throughout their day.

Fuel your organization’s growth (marketing and otherwise!) with a few updates to your website and processes.

Nonprofit Capacity Building on Your Website

A good website can be a powerful tool for building capacity across your team. In addition to offering information and features that help your visitors, it’s a tool that can streamline internal processes for your organization.

Prevent Simple Questions With an Easy-to-Navigate Website Structure

Do you get calls and emails asking the same questions day after day? There’s a good chance these people checked your website before reaching out and were unable to find answers. Stop wasting your time and your supporter’s time by organizing the pages on your website in a logical and easy to follow way. This includes user-friendly characteristics like accessible page names, a clear navigation and steering clear of dead links.

Read more about how to structure a website and check out our common website structures for nonprofits.

Remember That Website Content Matters

The website structure won’t mean much if the content on these pages fails to answer your frequently asked questions. Who is the audience for each page? What information are they looking for? What should be their next step? Program pages that fail to mention how to apply and Item Donation pages that omit drop-off hours or locations don’t do anyone any favors.

The information you provide on each page is a critical part of reaching your goals. Dig into our top web page content tips to help you with some of the most important pages on your site and avoid preventable calls and emails.

House the Functionality You Need Directly on Your Website

Online donations, volunteer management, event registrations — all of this can be done directly on your website to save you the time and frustration of dealing with a mess of tools that don’t communicate with each other.

If your website doesn’t do what you need it to, consider building a site that does. Creating a patchwork system that brings in unnecessary and complicated tools creates more work for you and your team, and the results can suffer.

Your website has the potential to be a tool for growth through simplifying the tools and processes that your organization depends on most. Systems that are easy for your team AND supporters to use are priceless in the quest for building capacity.

Integrate Your Website With Other Tools

Data entry is mindless and unnecessary in this day and age. When you integrate your website with the other tools you use, like a donor management system or email service, you can automate data migration, keep better track of your supporters and simplify reporting. Save yourself the time, headaches and human error mistakes and increase your nonprofit’s results with integrations you can set and forget.

Two Bonus Ways to Increase Capacity

Outside of your website, there are a few other options for nonprofit capacity building, with the added bonus of increasing results and reducing frustrations.

Streamline Your Processes

As much as we’d like it to, it doesn’t make sense to do everything through your website. Enter: G Suite. Using Google’s G Suite for your email, calendar, document, file storage, video call needs and more can go a long way with simplifying things and making sure your tech infrastructure is organized in one place. See how to use it to streamline your processes.

What other processes can you simplify? Are there tasks you complete on a daily or weekly basis that could be easier or even cut? What’s your biggest time-suck? Keep track of where your time goes, looking for those easy-to-fix culprits.

That could be scheduling social media posts with a tool like Buffer instead of logging in to post multiple times throughout the day. Or creating an editorial calendar to prevent last-minute scrambling to keep up with a blog or newsletter.

Make & Stick to a Strategy

What planning can you do ahead of time to make things easier on yourself? When you think through the whole project and your ideal results at the outset, projects tend to go smoother. While unexpected twists and turns may still occur, the last-minute panic of a creeping timeline can be tamed in many cases.

Strategizing your marketing plan can also mean cutting channels and projects that don’t move your mission forward or that are unsuccessful with your target audience. Don’t ever feel bad about quitting something that isn’t working! It creates the capacity for you to focus and zero in on the projects that show the most potential for growth.

How Project Home Again Did It

Our client Project Home Again was able to use their website and a nonprofit team of two to increase their capacity and grow their organization dramatically over the course of a year. See how.

A logical website structure answered client and donor questions so their team didn’t have to. And a volunteer management system cut down substantially on the back-and-forth emails and phone calls to vet and schedule both new and old volunteers. They used the new-found capacity to network, host their first-ever gala, foster relationships with major donors and apply for technology grants.

Are there ways you can better use your website for nonprofit capacity building? What about through your processes or marketing strategy? Let us know how you’ll spend your extra time in the comments below!