Why Brand Strategy is So Important To Social Change Website Design

Websites give us a snapshot of what an organization is like. Is your website making a bad first impression? Designing your site with principles of brand strategy can help.

Imagine you hear about a really interesting social impact organization that sounds like it’s doing important work in an area you have a lot of interest in. You’re immediately curious and want to know more. What’s one of the first things you do? Head right to their website.

You might be on your phone at a conference, working at your desk, or at home surfing on your tablet. You might go directly to their homepage, or you might be clicking a link someone shared that goes to a page deep within their website. Wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, the second you arrive, you’re presented with a snapshot of the organization.

And in this instant, you start forming an opinion. Is this organization interesting? Do they reflect your values? Are they credible? Effective? Trustworthy? Relevant?

Decisions the organization made months or years ago to introduce you to its brand at this moment — from the budget they set for the website, to the partner they worked with, to their content, design, and technology choices — are now significantly influencing what you’ll do next. Will you explore further, perhaps sign up for a newsletter, and hopefully visit again? Or will you leave without viewing another page, likely never to return?

Of course, the difference between a website that helps build a meaningful relationship with someone and one that turns them off for good isn’t as cut-and-dried as our hypothetical scenario. But it’s not an overstatement to say that websites play a pivotal role in how effectively nonprofits are engaging audiences and turning that engagement into action.

Understanding Brand Value

So, why do people choose to engage with social impact brands? And what role does a website play in creating this engagement?

We engage with nonprofits because they give us an opportunity to put our values into action. Purpose-driven organizations provide us with ways to help realize a world more like the one we’d like to live in.The nature of this relationship — and why it matters to us — is based on the kind of engagement we’re looking for.

“Casual” supporters such as donors, volunteers, and brand advocates are typically attracted by a nonprofit’s intangible and aspirational value — subjective things like the kind of world we’d like to live in, our emotions, and how we’d like others to see us. For these audiences, imagery, storytelling, and campaigns bring them closer to issues they identify with and are usually the most important part of their experience with the brand.

More engaged audiences, such as issue area experts, practitioners, and policymakers are also influenced by intangible qualities. Taking it a step further, though, they also want to know the tangible ways social impact organizations can help them be more effective in their own work. For these audiences, access to things like knowledge resources, tools, and networks is usually the most important part of the brand experience.

Of course, whatever a person’s specific needs and interests, it’s the job of a nonprofit’s website to create an experience that bridges the divide between interest and action. And if it is to be an authentic and effective expression of a nonprofit’s brand, a website must represent an organization and respond to the needs of its audience as well as we would if we were representing the organization in person.

Designing Digital Brand Experiences

When an organization creates (or redesigns) its website, there’s an understandable focus on things like making sure it’s “visually appealing,” “well-organized,” “mobile-friendly,” and other fundamentals of good design. These are all important things, but they only scratch the surface of reasons why people visit our websites. Design’s role in translating different types of brand value goes further than these basic principles of effective design.

If social change brands are to build the kinds of relationships they want with audiences — and if they are to have the kind of impact they envision — we must approach the design process with the goal to provide different people with the kinds of value they seek in a nonprofit and its mission. The website is simply a conduit for this exchange.

Using brand strategy as the lens through which we view the websites we create, website process is the best way to ensure we accomplish this goal. Because if successful design (and by this I mean design’s true definition) is all about context, then brand strategy is by far the best way to give everyone who contributes to the process the insight they need to create a website that helps social impact organizations achieve their goals online and in the real world.

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Learn more about Constructive at www.constructive.co, or get brand strategy, content, design, and technology insights from our entire team by following us on Medium at www.medium.com/@constructive.