You want to make a positive impact with your nonprofit organization, but it’s difficult to do that without the proper digital foundation.

Discovering What's Possible

Strategy isn’t just a buzzword. A digital strategy establishes the overall direction your website will follow, providing a digital purpose and aligning it to your nonprofit’s goals. It isn’t optional if your goal is to design a website that will help you scale your impact long term.

Why invest in Strategy for your website?

The strategy process helps you build your website on a solid foundation that will serve your audience for a long time. Creating a basic website without much strategy is possible, but eventually, you will run into some limitations. There will be something your audience needs that you can’t provide because you didn't build the tech with that need or problem in mind.

If you build it, they will not come.

CauseLabs CEO Sheryle Gillihan likes to say that “the world wide web is not the field of dreams.”

Despite there being more than four billion internet users, there are almost 1.9 billion websites in existence. It’s difficult to effectively claim a corner in this crowded community. Why should another website exist if not to serve your audience? For a platform that requires an investment of time, thought, talent, and dollars, we believe strategy is the key to understanding your problem statement and unlocking the creativity that builds the community impact you desire.

Make CauseLabs Your Digital Strategy Partner

CauseLabs has more than 17 years of deep experience working with the social sector in helping nonprofits scale their impact through strategy, website design, custom web development, and website care plans.

Our LEGO case study is one example of our proven experience in digital strategy. LEGO contacted CauseLabs when they needed help with digital applications for their girls’ suite of products, LEGO Friends, that was showing early signs of breakout success. They wanted to build hands-on, minds-on, creative experiences with children to refine and execute their vision. Their initial digital efforts were falling short, and they needed a big franchise win.

CauseLabs was eager to support young girls in their STEM exploration and engage them as creative, capable builders and creators.

The LEGO Story Maker apps.

CauseLabs helped LEGO refine its vision and strategy for creative expression into a multi-app platform that went beyond anything tried before. The LEGO Friends Maker Suite was born, which set off a paradigm shift away from one-release games toward creative tools to be updated and improved over time. This change shifted the perception of digital as more than a marketing channel to a good brand engagement opportunity that reinforces and supplements the physical play experience that people cherish about LEGO.

Human-Centered Approach to Strategy

The people you serve have unique problems. Through partnerships you can create a tech solution to solve those problems. With CauseLabs, it’s a partnership where we work collaboratively to develop solutions to complex challenges.

When taking a human-centered approach, some of the items we discuss are below.

Accessibility

Providing a great user experience for everyone on your website allows you to more efficiently deliver your message, serve your audience, and meet your goals. Consider accessibility in your website strategy to address those with varying abilities. To make your website truly accessible, you have to understand the people in the community you serve. Understand their unique needs and think critically about how to use technology to meet those needs. Language, screen readers, colors, white space, element size, alt text, and screen size are essential considerations in the web strategy process.

Understanding Your Community and Their Needs

Your website is more than just a design. It’s a real experience for real people. A good strategy allows your organization to use your website to meet your audience’s needs, wants, and behaviors. Because we focus on the audience throughout the strategy process, we can partner with you to create custom, innovative solutions.

CauseLabs’ Shares Your Motivations

Strategy isn’t about numbers or checking items off a list. We can’t emphasize this enough. It’s about people! This is true in all sectors, but especially resonates with our nonprofit, social enterprise and civic engagement partners.

If you want your digital strategy to be effective, focus on the heart of why you do what you do and who you serve. Our motivation as a web agency is to see your organization endure, improve, and expand its reach.

It is in large part through our work with our partners that we can achieve our mission of growing positive impact. Starting with a strategy phase sets the tone for our work together and allows us to build a strategic partnership that leads to exponential impact.

Revealing Brand Identity

Your brand is more than just a logo. It’s who you are. People develop emotional connections to people, not machines. The story of who you are and what you do is integral to your digital strategy. When you’re transparent and speak with your audience with honesty and authenticity, they’ll be more likely to identify with your message and approach.

Your audience wants to control their site experience, so we help you get comfortable with sharing more, not less. We want to help you share your story in a way that helps those you serve get what they need.

Understanding User Intent

Your nonprofit probably has an audience already, but it's best not to assume you know everything about them. An effective strategy requires that you research to connect the dots further. It also requires ongoing evaluation and an impact-driven mindset.

Start by asking yourself:

What do you already know about your audience and their needs?
What do you want to know about your audience?
How can you gather the information you're seeking?

There are many tools and methods to gather quantitative and qualitative data that can help form a narrative about your audience.

The more you know about your audience, the more you can customize your website for them. But more data is not always better. Our philosophy at CauseLabs is to help you collect the information you need and let your audience know why you’re seeking it. Some more vulnerable audiences may be justifiably concerned about providing information about themselves.

The positive impact you want to make with your organization is unique. Your vision and goals and the needs of those you serve are of the utmost importance to the CauseLabs team. Together, we can use technology to change the world for the better.

We’re experts in digital strategy for good. Contact us to make a bigger impact, starting with a clear direction and solid foundation.

The Result?

Strategies that drive confident decisions.
Actions to take your impact further.

Strategy