Five ways Friends of Inharrime can improve their nonprofit website #SkillsForChange

Friends of Inharrime, a nonprofit supporting youth education and nutrition in Mozambique, asked the Skills for Change community for five ways to improve their website design.

How hard is it to use our website? How clear is it?

Please take a look at our website and suggest five simple changes we could make. We’d like to more clearly communicate our projects, mission, impact, and how to get involved.

Here are five design changes to consider:

Landing Page
A strong landing page will capture visitors’ attentions and lead them to click deeper into the site for more information or to get involved. With the current site design, new visitors are taken to a News page. It is difficult to get a quick sense of what Friends stands for from the news page, which features a loosely connected set of news updates. Visitors landing on the news page may get the impression that the nonprofit is inactive since news posts are infrequent with as much as 8 months between updates. In contrast to the News page, the Projects page is quite strong. It has a nice balance between photos and text and tells a clear set of stories. My recommendation is to use the Projects page as the home page for this website until news updates are available on a weekly or even daily posting schedule.

Impact Summary
I recommend adding a new page that focuses on results that Friends has achieved. From content on the site today, it is challenging to tell how effective the nonprofit is at translating support and donations into results. A couple short paragraphs and informational graphics could really help to inform the public about the impact that Friends is making. Since the mission focuses on education and nutrition, I’d recommend identifying and illustrating at least one key metric in each of those areas. Three candidate metrics to consider include: (1) number of children impacted, (2) impact on reading, math and computer literacy, (3) impact on ability of each child to receive necessary daily nutrition.

Responsive Layout
The current site doesn’t adapt to mobile devices and different screen sizes. An easy fix is to rebuild the website using a responsive framework like Skeleton. Since the Friends site will feature news updates, it might be best to try relaunching as a WordPress site and basing the design on the Skeleton WordPress theme. Since the overall site is simple, transitioning to a responsive design should be achievable in under a week.

Donate Button
The donate button is buried on the support page. Instead, feature a donate info block on every page and include a thermometer that indicates a fundraising goal and the amount raised so far. State want will be done with the money once the goal is reached. A great tool that nonprofits can use is Razoo.org, which makes it easy to set up and manage fundraising campaigns. Like many nonprofits, Friends of Inharrime already has a donate page on Razoo that is waiting to be claimed and activated.

Describe Other Support Needed
The site asks, “If you are interested in supporting our work, please e-mail mary at friendsofinharrime dot org.” But what should I email Mary about? Keep this prompt, but add another paragraph or a few bullets that give visitors ideas for how they might offer support. For example, maybe the organization is seeking advice from a nutritionist or seeking volunteers to travel to Inharrime and teach classes. Volunteers will be more likely to self identify if these needs are made clear through brief explanations.