Following on from the Making Links conference in November last year, one of the conference delegates raised a question with me regarding eliciting website requirements. So that everyone can benefit, I’ve attempted to answer the question here;

I think where we need the assistance is clarifying exactly what we want/need, from a website point of view, and help determining this.

Understand your organisation’s objectives and strategic goals

A website is a business tool. It helps to deliver the objectives and goals of your organisation. For example, a company that manufactures Widgets may have a website which provides information on Widgets (which is a pre-sales function), compares Widgets to  Blidgets (also a pre-sales function), allows customers to log a support request (a post-sales function), and uses the company’s branding to enhance market position (a marketing function). The website may also allow customers to pay bills  online (an accounts payable function) and network with other users of Widgets (a community building function).

A non profit organisation is no different – it still has goals and objectives, and your website should support this. For instance, if one of the objectives of your organisation is to raise awareness  about a particular topic – then this will be an objective of your website. This is the ‘what‘ – or the objective. The ‘how‘, or the implementation details – then become part of the discussion between your organisation and the web developer.

Some other common requirements of not for profit organisations (and thus requirements of their websites) include;

• Facilitating donor relations and fundraising: Many non profit organisations are dependent upon donations and a donor base. One of the objectives of their web presence is therefore to foster relationships with donors. This may be implemented as simply as having a Paypal donate button on the site, or having something such as CiviCRM allow donors/members to register their interest online. Other functionality that can help meet this requirement includes the ability to subscribe to RSS feeds (which are done automatically using something like WordPress) so that donors can keep abreast of news, or allowing people to submit their email and subscribe to email newsletters. Again, don’t confuse the ‘what’  – ie facilitating donor relations – with the ‘how’. The ‘what’ for organisations may be the same, but the way in which they are implemented is likely to differ based on the the nature, ethos and community that the organisation serves. Another example
• Raising awareness of issues and influencing behaviour or choices: Many not for profits are focussed on a particular area or cause. Often, one of the aims of the organisation is to raise awareness of the cause by informing the general public. This is the ‘what’. The ‘how’ can differ from site to site – for instance some may use story telling, by providing real life accounts. Others may opt for a ‘brochureware’ style site offering clear and concise information to help influence behaviours or choices.
• Brand awareness: This is an area that non profits are traditionally not strong at. The bigger not for profits, such as World Vision and Oxfam have very good ‘brand awareness’. Their logos, colours and name are easily recognised by the general public. This is the ‘what’. ‘How’ this is done on a website comes down to having a standard logotype, standard colours and branding for your organisation, and ensuring that your web presence reflects this. (As a side note, part of ensuring brand awareness is also about having a Web Style Guide which is adhered to by the staff charged with maintaining web content).
• Building communities of practice: Some organisations seek to build or support communities which share common values or a common ethos – for example those interested in the environment, support groups for those with a particular disease or affliction or groups sharing an attribute in common – for interest those who are HIV positive. Building the community is the ‘what’ – and a forum, wiki, blog or other tool is the ‘how’.
• Providing services online: There are some services provided by not for profit organisations which may be time consuming, expensive or otherwise cumbersome to administer using a manual process. They may be candidates for automation via the website. The ‘what’ here is providing the service online – and the ‘how’ is the method used to implement – for instance an online form or instant messaging system.

Your organisation’s business plan, strategic plan, annual plan or annual objectives document (if it has one) is a great place to start eliciting which functions your website needs to support.

Prioritisation

Prioritising requirements when developing a new web presence is vitally important. Having a strong strategic or other business plan is a huge advantage here, as it will already outline priorities for you (and hence priorities for the website). If you do not have this type of document to refer to, then there are other methods to prioritise requirements;

• Return on investment: Return on investment can be measured in many ways, such as labour savings (by automating a manual process online), income generation (by facilitating online donations or donor relations) or brand awareness. Which of your requirements is going to give you the greatest return on investment? Which return is the most important for your organisation
• Effort: Some web site features are harder than others (in terms of effort, cost, overhead to maintain etc). Your web developer will be able to indicate which features are high effort or high cost and which are not. It may be in your interests to get some ‘quick wins’ on the board – those features which provide a good return but which are low cost/low effort.

It may be useful to map out requirements and the effort they will take on a graph with two axes – one for return and one for effort. Those that are high return/low effort or high return/high effort should be prioritised higher.

Measuring whether the website you are designing will meet your objectives

When identifying requirements (the ‘how’), think about how you will measure whether the objectives that your website is supporting have been met or not. This takes us into the field of website metrics – measuring the success of your website. This can be as simple as measuring how many ‘Contact forms’ have been received or how many times someone has downloaded Brochure X. Focusing on website requirements in this way again helps to align them to the objectives of the organisation.

(NOTE: The best book I’ve found in this field is Hurol Inan’s ‘Measuring the success of your website’ – highly recommended)

The Making Links 08 conference was held this week at the University of Melbourne. The tagline of the conference is ‘where social action and technology meet’ – and the delegates are primarily from the community, not for profit, activist and educational sectors.

I decided to catch the train up to Melbourne as it’s both cheaper and less stressful than driving in peak hour traffic through the West Gate car park. Who should happen to sit next me on the train? None other than former Liberal member for Corangamite – Stewart McArthur. The irony was not lost on me – a presenter at a largely left wing conference chancing to sit next to a right wing MP. Perhaps the universe was having a chuckle. Stewart was devouring his way through at least three newspapers – so I tried to break the ice by asking him which one he thought was the most truthful. To his credit, he took the question very well and provided me with advice on the merits of various individual journalists. We got talking and I found out he was a keen runner, and he encouraged me to take up the sport. I felt like a politician when I refused to commit

My talk on the day was on free software for non-profit organisations;

making-links-kathyreid-useful-free-software (Open Office .odp file)

making-links-kathyreid-useful-free-software (Powerpoint .ppt file)

The presentation went well, and the audience let me know they were very pleased with it – and had a load of questions!

I then lead the CMS session – which didn’t go quite so well as we spent a lot of time on security issues rather than being able to demonstrate the software in a lot of depth.The group really wanted to see some different options with skinning Drupal and Joomla – however I hadn’t upoaded any and I couldn’t get FTP access with the wireless network connection. There was a lot of contention over whether Joomla or Drupal were more appropriate for use – with the comment raised theat Drupal documentation wasn’t up to scratch.

Some of the key themes expressed during the day were;

• Concern over having sensitive information in databases hosted on the web: CiviCRM is a tool which holds contact details and personal information on donors and volunteers. Delegates were concerned about the security that would be applied to ensure that unauthorised access did not occur to this data.I’ve provided some links below for further information on these products.
  • WordPress security tips and tricks
  • WordPress security whitepaper
  • Drupal and security – Drupal discussion groups
  • Drupal security best practices
  • CiviCRM security consideration
• Criteria on which to base a CMS decision: Many organisations wanted information on how to select the best CMS for their need. One of the delegates provided this handy link to CMS matrix which allows organisations to compare the functionality that is available through different CMSs.
• How to being a foray into social networking: The organisations that were present needed pointers on how to step into the social networking waters – with some already on Facebook or Twitter, but with no real engagement strategy or supporting strategies.

Other key presentations included:

Jason King (non profit web designer) presented tips for non profits, including;

• Register your name and keep it registered (so that somebody can’t grab it when it expires) - this theme was also bourne out by Darryl later on in the session with his presentation on whatsinaname.com.au, which lists all of the domain name registrars and prices for domain hosting (interestingly my host, Servers Australia isn’t on the list – and they’d be near the top for pricing)
• Make sure that you keep all the details such as passwords for the site – so that in the event of a disagreement or dispute with the web designer, you’re able to get into the site and take control
• Choose your web developers carefully – sometimes the director’s brother’s kid son is not the best person to plan or design your not for profit web site.

Andrew Edwards, of Huge Object also gave a presentation on working with developers, the key take aways being;

• Know what you’re paying for – understanding exactly what the developer is quoting on can give you much clearer expectations of what will be delivered
• Check our your developer - by making sure that they know what things like web standards are for instance
• Have a clear idea of what you want in your website – so that what is delivered is more likely to be what is delivered

[Updated 17 Nov 08 to include summary of Jason and Andrew's presentations]

Deakin Uni was approached by Bonnie Babes a couple of months ago to assist with their web presence, which was quite dated. I’ve been working on a redesign using free and open source software. The key features are;

• An easily updateable website using the WordPress personal publishing system
• A custom theme for WordPress based on Bonnie Babes’ organisational colours
• A number of freely available WordPress plugins including WP e-Commerce, SEO Tools, ShareThis and pageMash

It wasn’t all plain sailing however. The hosting platform (which is freely provided with thanks to Apex Hosting in Melbourne) is based on Windows and IIS. My use of WordPress has centred on a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) based platform, and I’ve certainly not used PHP much under IIS. The fact that this platform is in use has limited a number of the features of WordPress, so much so that it is likely that the site will be moved to an alternative hosting arrangement. They include;

• Inability to use nice permalinks: Because IIS has no inbuilt mod_rewrite (one of the Apache modules that most hosting providers have installed), the pretty permalinks don’t work in IIS without a lot of kludging. While it is possible to get them to work using mod_rewrite alternatives for IIS, most hosting providers don’t have these installed by default – and they’re unlikely to install on request. WordPress have obviously come across difficulties with IIS and permalinks before – hence this article.
• Inability to use cURL libraries: The cURL libraries in PHP are incredibly useful. They are also used by the WP e-Commerce plugin (which I was aiming to use to facilitate an online shop) as part of the checkout functionality. It wasn’t until I got to testing the checkout that PHP threw a fatal error
• Inability to have WordPress in one directory, and make your blog another: This is related to the permalink issue, largely due to the fact that IIS does not support mod_rewrite or .htaccess without third party tools
• Difficulty making certain files and directories writable: On a Linux system, you can easily use filesystem permissions to make a file or directory (to Linux they are the same thing) writable. Writable files and directories are used all throughout WordPress, for things like;

• Sitemap generation
• Storing of uploaded media such as images, word documents and pdfs
• The ability to edit CSS and other design elements through the administration interface

So, where to from here? It’s likely that we’ll go with another hosting provider who provides a LAMP architecture..