Too Many Cooks in the Kitchen: Designing Your Nonprofit Organization Website
Many nonprofit brands are built by a group consensus of different ideas and perspectives.
This typically happens not because anyone chose that process deliberately, but because of how nonprofit organizations operate: board members with opinions, staff who wear multiple hats, a volunteer who helped with the website, a designer who donated a few hours. So everyone contributes and everyone is fully invested; this sounds good in theory, but in practice this can lead to a lack of a single authority making the final call of the design.
This is one of the most common structural challenges in nonprofit brand work, and it's worth understanding the dynamic., not as a failure, but as a pattern so that the organization’s brand can be successful.
How nonprofit brands typically get built
In many organizations, nonprofit or otherwise, brand work is designed in layers. The first version of the logo was created years ago under one group of leadership. Then, then website was built by whoever had the skills and availability at that point in time. As time goes on, new materials get produced as they're needed and by whoever who can produce them.
This leads to a fragmented brand design process, done by many people with different perspectives and goals. Without a documented brand system and a clear decision-maker, each new piece gets built slightly differently. This is not to say anyone is doing poor work, but because each person is making different decisions without a shared reference point.
What digital product design can tell us about this
This is what is called design by committee in the digital product design space; when design decisions require buy-in from multiple stakeholders with different priorities, the output tends toward the average of everyone's input rather than toward what serves the end user most clearly.
For a nonprofit organization specifically, the end user is the donor deciding whether to give, the community member looking for services, and the volunteer figuring out if this organization is one they want to be part of. A design process that focuses on everyone’s hat in the ring making all the decisions can actually take the focus off of what the end-users actually need.
This isn’t a result of malicious intent; everyone involved in building the brand cares. It's a process problem, and process problems have process solutions.
The pattern that emerges
The result of building by consensus without a point of reference tend to look recognizable to anyone inside these organizations because branded materials will look slightly different from one another and messaging shifts in tone.
Many nonprofit communications staff know that the brand doesn't quite represent the organization as it is now, but with no clear owner and no documented guidelines, changing it means starting a conversation that involves too many people with too many opinions.
What becomes possible with clear design authority
When there's a clear design owner (one person or process responsible for how the brand looks and sounds) the brand becomes cohesive and decisions happen faster. The allows the organization's brand to become recognizable in a way that grows and lasts over time; one shared language for how this organization presents itself that everyone can use, consistently, over time.
Take the next step
Want to see where your nonprofit's brand stands? Download the free Website Checklist, 10 questions that help you evaluate your online presence through the eyes of a first-time visitor.
→ Get it free at wellfolkdesign.com/resources