I promised to get practical. In 10 minutes, we can put your homepage to the test.
You don’t need analytics. You don’t even need to know much about marketing.
All you need is your website, a few competitors’ websites, and the willingness to view them from the outside.
1. Read the first screen.
Start with the part of your homepage you see before you scroll.
Could this language belong to another organization?
Excellence, innovation, community, impact, transformative, committed.
These words aren’t necessarily wrong. I’m sure most of it is true. The problem is that other websites in your sector probably say exactly the same things.
If your competitors can make the same claims, you’ve lost your competitive edge.
And by competitors, I don’t just mean organizations that do exactly what you do. Your competitors are other organizations that ask the same people for the same finite resources—funding, attention, participation, membership, enrollment, volunteer time, talent, or support. A museum may be competing with a theater for an audience member’s Saturday night. A youth organization may be competing with an environmental organization for the same donor’s $1,000. A school may be competing with organizations that look nothing like it for a foundation’s grant dollars.
That’s the competitive landscape you need to understand.
Look at the language again. What, specifically, does it tell someone about your organization that another organization couldn’t claim? Is there a clear point of view? A particular strength? Something you do exceptionally well? A problem you are particularly well equipped to address?
If the answer is buried three screens down — or on the About page — you have a problem.
2. Look for the connection to your audience.
Organizations know an enormous amount about themselves. Their websites often reflect that.
Programs. Services. History. Mission. Credentials. Accomplishments. Strategic priorities.
All important. But the people coming to the website arrive with something else on their minds: their own priorities.
A prospective donor is deciding where to put limited philanthropic dollars. A family is choosing among schools. An audience member has dozens of ways to spend an evening. A potential member is deciding whether joining is worth it. A volunteer is deciding where to give time.
So read the homepage again and ask:
Does it connect what your organization does to something the people you need to reach actually want?
And then go one step further:
Does it give them a compelling reason to donate, enroll, attend, join, volunteer, or pay attention?
That’s a much tougher test than asking whether the website accurately describes the organization.
3. Check out the competition.
This may be the most useful part of the exercise.
Identify three or four organizations competing for the same funding, audiences, families, members, volunteers, or attention. Pull up their websites alongside yours.
Now compare their value propositions — the particular strength, advantage, or benefit each organization is putting forward.
What are they claiming? What are they emphasizing? What territory have they already staked out? Where is the turf you can own?
And then look at the language itself.
Does everyone sound remarkably similar?
Could you swap their name for yours?
Would anyone even notice?
Businesses do this kind of research every day. They study competitors, customers, markets, pricing, products, and positioning because they understand that no business operates in isolation.
Nonprofits must be doing it, too.
Like it or not, you operate in a marketplace: competing for money, attention, participation, talent, and loyalty.
That doesn’t make a nonprofit less mission-focused. It means you understand the environment in which the mission must succeed.
Competitive research is just as relevant to a nonprofit, school, arts organization, or association as it is to a commercial business.
You can’t fully understand your own position without understanding the alternatives available to the people you’re trying to reach.
Your website is your organization’s front door. It has to do more than explain what you do.
And it must give them a reason to act.
