Hi friends 👋🏻

This week, some tips on how to advocate to include website improvements in your organization's 2027 budget!

Want links to recent emails or a sign-up link to share? Go to The Digital Landscape sign-up page​

For many of us, it's budgeting season

If your organization's fiscal year ends in December we're now officially in budgeting season. Your Board will be presented with next year's budget to approve some time in November or early December, which means NOW is the time to start building the case for website improvements needed in 2027.

(And for those of you with a fiscal year end in June or September, just think of this as giving you extra lead time!!)

If you're the website manager, but not a budget approver

If you manage your organization's website but don't manage the budget that would fund improvements, you need to convince whoever holds the purse-strings to provide the funds you need.

It's very common for a communications manager (or even a combined communications AND development staffer) to be responsible for day-to-day website management. That means that person – perhaps it's you? – is acutely aware of issues that need improvement. And you probably don't have the time or funds needed to fix everything you want to fix.

This might not necessarily be a conversation about an entire website redesign or rebuild.

Often there are lots of little piecemeal improvements — things like:

• Improving accessibility
• Adding multilingual content
• Setting up analytics and conversion tracking
• Updating online donation forms to add to features
• Building a searchable, filterable resource library

These are all features included in my guide to must-have features for nonprofit websites.

How to make the case for website improvements

Ironically, executive leadership is often more likely to get excited about the big, splashy, once-every-five-years website overhaul than the ongoing, smaller improvements that I listed above.

Unfortunately, many nonprofits are in the habit of budgeting for website improvements on a three- or five-year cycle, planning to do a big expensive project periodically rather than investing a smaller amount EVERY YEAR for continuous, rolling improvements.

In my experience, this approach can actually reduce website-related spending over a ten-year+ timeframe, and avoids the pattern where a new website declines in quality until it gets so bad that a wholesale rebuild is needed.

Here are a few suggestions of ways to frame an ask for small or medium-sized improvement projects in 2027:

• Continuing to offer a website that doesn't meet accessibility standards sends the message that we are not interested in serving users with disabilities (including donors), and exposes us to legal risk.
• Wouldn't you like to know exactly which marketing campaigns are resulting in the strongest online donation rates? If so, let's do more to track donation sources.
• Since our organization operates remotely, our website is the only
• Our users tell us they find it difficult to find the resources they're looking for. We've even heard this from our funders at XYZ Foundation that gives provides 30% of our annual operating budget. Can we invest in improvements to our resource library to prioritize user experience?

Over the years, I've worked to shift my conversations about website optimization beyond technical shortcomings and audit results to tackle these investment-level conversations.

Every website project needs buy-in from investors: executive leadership, Board members, and donors all need to get excited about budgeting dollars for website improvements, and we need to make sure they see and appreciate the results.

If you have questions (or success stories) about the budgeting for new website projects, hit reply and let me know!

Until next time ✨

— Ed Harris (your digital strategy guide)

Connect on LinkedIn

​