Non-Profit Web Design

Over on my O'Reilly Media blog, I've written "Will Facebook (all but) replace corporate websites?," a look at where I think the third-party social media websites are going. Here's a taste:

The goal of most websites is to extended the interaction with the visitor beyond this one visit: we seek to sell them a product, join our mailing list, buy tickets to our event or subscribe to us in a news reader. Facebook is quickly becoming the most important email list and news reader. If it continues to innovate (and borrow ideas from innovative competitors) it could quickly become a major commercial portal as well. As its adoption rate climbs within the ranks of our target audiences, it becomes an effective way to extend visitor relationship and build more intimate brand identities.

This will change company's interactions with customers, who will start to expect and then demand real-time interaction. This can take many forms--status updates, calendars, videos--but the emphasis will be on immediacy. The style will shift from slickly-produced mass marketing to a one-on-one responsive back and forth. Smart marketers will think less in terms of selling and more in terms of relationship building. Analytics and constantly-rolling A/B tests will give us a near real-time gauge with which to measure the success of these relationships. The recession is bringing a new urgency for measurable results and might actually help shift corporate and non-profit budgets away from high-price opinions and toward this new style of social-network-mediated marketing.

It will be interesting to see how organizations adapt to social media's evolving role.

This Quaker meeting sits along Philadelphia's Main Line suburbs and is making special efforts at outreach. They wanted a design refresh that would allow the heads of committees direct access to their section of the websites. With multiple log-ins and high content needs, we went with the Drupal content management system, which has become the CMS of choice for many non-profits.

The design is built from scratch with obvious nods to the Facebook look-and-feel: we wanted something that would seem both familiar and fresh to the young professional crowd that is this meeting's most obvious target audience.

Visit: Haverfordfriendsmeeting.org