Changing direction: aligning a website with a new strategy
This charity came to me as they had recently lost a significant source of funding so had decided to change direction and develop new services.
The problem was that they were struggling to attract funders and commissioners for their new services too, even though their change in direction was to support the most vulnerable members of their community with issues such as food, debt and mental health.
They knew their website wasn't helping, and initially that was the main thing they wanted me to look at.
But it quickly became apparent that the problem was bigger than the website.
Working out what had changed
We started with a two-hour strategic review.
Rather than going straight into individual pages and deciding what needed rewriting, we stepped back and looked at the organisation itself.
- What was its new direction?
- What services did it now want to provide?
- Who did it need to reach?
- Who were the people making decisions about funding and commissioning those services?
- What would they need to know before they could have confidence in the organisation?
And there was another issue. The change in direction hadn't yet been fully understood or accepted internally. Staff weren't all clear about what the organisation was now trying to achieve.
That matters, because you can't communicate a clear message externally if there isn't yet a shared understanding of it internally.
So our review covered much more than the website. We talked about the new direction of the organisation, its services, its stakeholders, its commissioners. And then we discussed the information those stakeholders needed and how the CEO could bring staff with him through the changes.
Then we looked at the website
Once we'd established what the organisation was trying to achieve, it became much easier to see why the existing website wasn't working.
It had three fundamental problems.
First, it was still describing services that reflected the organisation's old direction rather than the one it was now trying to take.
Second, it wasn't providing the information that important stakeholders, particularly potential funders and the local council, needed in order to understand the organisation and what it could offer.
And third, there were no clear journeys through the site for either those stakeholders or the people who might actually use the services.
The problem wasn't that the website looked dated or needed a few pages rewriting. It was communicating the wrong organisation to the wrong audiences.
What came out of the review
By the end of the session, the CEO had a much clearer picture of what was going wrong.
Some of the problems were with the website and could be addressed there. Others were internal and needed to be dealt with before the website could properly reflect the organisation's new direction.
He also had a clearer understanding of the different audiences the organisation now needed to communicate with, what those audiences needed from the website and how the site needed to change to support the organisation's plans.
That meant we could move on to the website with a clear purpose rather than simply redesigning what was already there.
The lesson
Sometimes an organisation asks for help with its website when the website isn't actually the problem.
A website can only communicate what an organisation knows about itself. If your services have changed, your audience has changed or the people inside the organisation aren't clear about where you're going, redesigning the homepage isn't going to fix that.
Sometimes the most useful thing you can do before changing the website is work out what the website now needs to do.