August × Jewish Care Victoria

A note on CMS selection and recommendations.

While other vendors might happily push something they have a vested interest in selling, we prefer to advocate for the right solution for Jewish Care Victoria based on your unique needs.

We are proficient with many tools and we advocate for choosing the right one for the job, not simply the product we have a license or existing affiliation with.

An experienced partner will collaborate to establish a thorough understanding of Jewish Care Victoria’s context, objectives, and long-term strategic ambitions. Then, select the optimum technology solution based on those current and prospective requirements. This is the best way to build for longevity and protect against repeating the same procurement process in the future.

We note your requirements, preferences, and objectives in selecting a CMS, and that it must:

Be actively supported and maintained
Be user-friendly for non-technical staff
Support flexible content structures
Provide strong security and permissions management
Support accessibility requirements
Enable SEO best practice
Support integrations and scalability
Minimise operational complexity

While we acknowledge these high-level requirements, we have not yet identified a CMS recommendation. There is risk associated with recommending a product without first validating how it will be used, what will make it effective, and other strategic organisational considerations, both short and long-term. These should be discussed in collaboration with Jewish Care Victoria’s key stakeholders.

To provide context and reassurance around our capability, here are some of the criteria and considerations we would assess throughout the process. We would relish the opportunity to discuss these with you in further detail.

A willingness to propose a product without fully understanding Jewish Care Victoria’s operational realities should provoke caution. Some vendors push for certain products simply because they’ve purchased expensive licenses and hope to recoup costs; when you invest in an expensive hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Things to keep in mind when selecting a CMS.

Reputation, market share and security stance.

For many reasons, selecting a CMS with a large, established market share is important. A broader developer support base reduces Jewish Care Victoria’s risk of lock-in. Concurrently, this provides a greater range of options when considering new functionality thanks to established ecosystems of plug-ins and features. From an administrator perspective, greater market share and platform ubiquity—particularly a factor with systems like WordPress, Craft CMS, and Drupal—mean new staff are more likely to be familiar with open-source admin interfaces. This ensures that Jewish Care Victoria maintains a high rate of productivity and continuity in the event of staff turnover, while equally minimising time spent onboarding new team members. The frequency of security assessment and associated patch releases ensure a robust, secure site.

Suitability for accessible interfaces and alignment with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

Inclusive design is crucial, especially for an aged care and disability service provider. A high proportion of older Australians will use the Jewish Care Victoria site. People with different preferences and abilities will use the site, often with assistive technologies like screen readers. August has comprehensive and proven experience in building highly accessible experiences, with clients like Guide Dogs leading the way as a global benchmark for accessible design.

Ease of use for marketing teams and administrators, with appropriate tiers of workflows and permissions.

In selecting and implementing content management systems, we make no assumptions about the technical proficiency of marketing or administrative teams. The right system should simplify site administration for every team and stakeholder without relying on development resources. You must act quickly and spin up new landing pages or digital campaign assets to capitalise on evolving opportunities in a competitive aged and community care sector. At the same time, you need control and appropriate system governance. You cannot afford to be hampered by clunky technology, cumbersome interfaces, or confusing approval processes.

Requirements for integration with other systems.

August has extensive experience with a range of system integrations. Project examples include:

Salesforce integration with Guide Dogs.
SharePoint integration with Mercy Health.
Custom CRM integration with Animals Australia.
HubSpot integration with Care Connect.
Stripe integration with Guide Dogs and Animals Australia.

Integration requirements (continued).

Regardless of Jewish Care Victoria’s platform requirements—noting the potential for existing platforms such as Raiser’s Edge, Mailchimp, Klaviyo, Google Analytics, and Meta advertising tools—we are confident in delivering a robust, secure integration that provides a compelling experience for the end-user while making the most of supporting systems. Any number of forms or third-party platforms can be integrated to ensure leads are delivered to the right place, maximising conversions while minimising the risks associated with handling confidential or personally identifiable information (PII) from customers. This ensures compliance with security best practices.

Additionally, several simpler integrations—for example, email signup via MailChimp, Google Analytics tracking, and more—can and will be considered throughout planning and delivery to ensure Jewish Care Victoria maximise the impact of all available platforms in your technology ecosystem.

Performance and scalability.

Performance can be difficult to retrofit. Rather than selecting a solution based on its performance attributes, achieving high-calibre performance depends more on the developer during the build to ensure best practices are followed and considered from the outset. Regardless of the chosen CMS, performance is at the forefront of all August builds and is core to every project from the start. Additionally, August focuses on building web applications that use the twelve-factor app methodology to build scalable software to meet evolving performance needs.

At a high level, through the use of a Content Delivery Network, scalable load-balanced application instances, and optimised code caching, we can provide a fast, performant end-user experience with a suitable CMS that will deliver value far beyond your requirements.

Using an open-source CMS.

This prevents you from being locked into expensive annual licensing or tied to a sole fixed vendor.

Security for donations.

Proven, robust integration capability to provide secure donation and lead capture facilities into the site.

Prioritising performance to maintain search marketing visibility.

Page speed is a confirmed ranking factor for Google’s search results. Our experience working in the aged care sector shows that search marketing visibility is crucial in lead generation. It is vital that Jewish Care Victoria is present and visible at the point of consideration for prospective customers—for example, when a person’s older parent has a fall at home, and they are thrust into navigating the unknown world of aged care services—to establish a healthy pipeline of leads to nurture towards conversion.

About our technical approach.

We meet modern best practice in development, testing and quality assurance. This includes:

Accountable development.

Every site undergoes rigorous testing at every stage. We standardise development, staging and production environments to catch issues early, and we conduct functional, browser, accessibility and performance testing before any release.

Accessibility compliance.

Accessibility is core to our collaborations with all clients. We are experienced with features like screen reader compatibility, keyboard navigation, colour contrast, content structure, and myriad other approaches to align with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

Agile delivery practice.

Frequent check-ins and progress updates give you visibility, reduce risk and ambiguity, and ensure a smooth, iterative delivery with no surprises or “big reveal” moments.

Continuous deployment.

We maintain fully automated deployment pipelines across development, UAT and production. All deployments are logged and attributed, with full code-level transparency and traceability for audit and review.

CRM development and integration.

We have extensive experience with CRM integration for a range of organisations, facilitating lead generation and sophisticated onboarding for healthcare and social services providers. This includes Salesforce, SharePoint, HubSpot, Stripe, and custom and proprietary CRM platforms. We are also building a bespoke CRM in the non-profit sector, supporting ongoing membership and supporter engagement.

Open-source technology.

Our solutions draw on more than 20 years of open-source expertise across PHP, Node, Python, Craft CMS, WordPress, Symfony, Laravel, React component libraries, and modern AI integrations. This ensures flexibility, longevity, and long-term maintainability.

Security.

Security is core to what we do. We implement a robust suite of best-practice security initiatives as part of our normal approach, including SSL encryption, site backups, and compliance with legal requirements around personally identifiable information (PII) and GDPR where relevant.

Site reliability and performance.

We build for speed and stability from day one. Your new site will load quickly, perform reliably, and support a streamlined experience for both site visitors and administrators.

Measure twice, select once — removing buyer’s remorse when choosing a digital agency.

How can you be sure you’re selecting the right digital agency? How do you remove that “oh no” moment?

Let’s face it. At some stage in your life, no matter what you do, you’ll experience buyer’s remorse. It’s inevitable. That moment when doubt sets in. The second and third moments when doubt turns to realisation. The realisation that you’ve made the wrong choice.

As time progresses you realise everything points to complete remorse. And now you’re stuck with whatever you have bought.

Doh!

When it comes to evaluating and selecting a digital agency, you can remove some of the guess work. Use your head and your heart. Remove buyer’s remorse and replace it with buyer’s delight.

In my 30 years of experience, I’ve spent time on both sides of the fence. I’ve worked in companies where I was responsible for choosing a digital agency, and now I work for one. So I thought I’d share my top six considerations. Some of these may be obvious but may also strike a chord.

1. Skills + capability are paramount.

What’s the difference between capability and skills? Most people can use a hammer but not many people can build a house.

Most agencies have skilled individuals with specific expertise across a range of subject matter. But can they come together to get you the best result?

In a constantly changing digital world, it is critical to understand your agency’s full capability. Can an agency solve problems or will they simply bow to the solution you put in front of them?

An agency’s true value comes out through genuine problem solving. You’re paying them for their expertise and capability, not just their skills. You will likely be with your chosen agency for many years to come, so don’t fall for the trap and select them purely on the basis of a sexy creative concept.

You need to probe and investigate and seek proof that they can actually manage all aspects of your digital marketing needs. From business interpretation to strategy. From design to development. And beyond into digital marketing, hosting, security, search, content, support and maintenance. Look for breadth and depth.

A recent Lunar New Year article by Darren Woolley of TrinityP3 talks about a centuries-old Chinese idiom and highlights how old stories can illuminate today’s lessons. His second example – To Hang a Sheep’s Head While Selling Dog Meat – reinforces the need to do your homework to truly understand what you’re getting. It’s worth a read.

2. Value for money.

As with many industries, in the digital agency world, you generally reap what you sow. That is, you get out what you put in. And I don’t just mean money. Most agencies base their remuneration on resource levels, daily rates and the time it takes to complete a project. Many are building in value-based pricing where possible. The old cliché – ‘you get what you pay for’ – definitely applies.

There are many agencies who provide value well beyond time and materials. There’s no point in screwing an agency down to a point where the margins are so slim that it is not worth the effort for them to work on your business. If an agency is given a decent budget, they’ll go the extra mile for you. You want them on your side batting for you every day.

Another Chinese idiom in Darren’s article highlights the fact that you are better off focusing on what you want to achieve rather than penny-pinching. The title perfectly reflects my point. At the end of the day – ‘wool comes from the sheep’s back’.

It’s up to you to provide enough room in the budget and to invest in the relationship to get the best possible outcome. You need to invest time, money and effort. It’s a two-way street. So take the time to understand how they charge for their services and strike the right balance between value for money, the best price and getting the right outcome. After all, isn’t that what’s most important? To get the right outcome.

3. Experience + strategy + execution wins.

Would you hire a graduate and pay them like an MD just because they were an A-grade student? Of course not. So, why would you select an inexperienced digital agency based on pretty pictures and an untested creative idea?

You need to choose an agency for business reasons first and foremost. It is crucial to ask the following questions:

Does the agency have the right amount of business acumen?
Do they have an understanding of your business?
Do they have the depth you need?
Can they help you develop a sound digital marketing strategy? And, more importantly, do they have the wherewithal to execute the strategy effectively?

Striking the right balance between strategy, creative and execution is critical. Adopting an approach of flexibility and iteration has become increasingly important in today’s ever-changing world.

Strategy is not linear. It should be seen as cyclical. Your agency needs to be able to support you when things change. But, the best strategy in the world is useless unless it is well executed. Focus on the ‘why’ as well as the ‘how’ and it will stand you in good stead.

Although a little long in the tooth now, an MIT Sloan Management Review article written by Donald N Sull in 2007 still resonates with me. Closing the gap between strategy and execution reinforces the need to strike the right balance and adopt a flexible, iterative approach. Sull applies the concept to business, but I think this iterative approach is even more relevant to digital marketers in 2015.

4. Culture club.

Values are at the heart of any business. Values drive culture and have a massive impact on how businesses treat their staff, clients and suppliers. If there is a misalignment of values between you and your agency, you are probably doomed from the start.

A leading UK organisation, CIPD, which specialises in HR and people development, published a report last year about the value in keeping culture, purpose and values at the heart of your SME. CIPD put it very simply and define culture as “the way we do things round here”. If there is a miss-match between the way your agency does things and the way your business does things, then you could be in for a difficult time.

Most agencies are genuine; filled with enthusiasm, creativity, energy and good intention.

Ask them what they value. If they spin you a story around ‘award-winning’ work or even worse, ‘bleeding-edge’ solutions – run!

However, if they can genuinely explain how their attitudes and behaviours get better outcomes, then you’re on a winner. Cultural alignment counts.

5. Who’s on first?

It’s great meeting all the wonderful people across the agency. Agency founders. Technical directors. Strategy leaders. Head of design. Content guru. Captain analytics. All are skilled and capable individuals.

But if your account manager doesn’t cut the mustard, you’re on a hiding to nowhere. This role is critical. They become the internal advocate for your business.

Your account manager needs credibility inside the agency and among their peers. You need to be confident that this person can work with you every day and ‘have your back’.

A recent blog post from a coaching forum, inCredible Messages, talks about how important it is to develop credibility and why you should care. It highlights five elements that lead to credibility:

integrity
competence
sound judgment
sensitivity, and
likeability

It positions credibility as a package deal.

I agree. If you apply these measures to your account manager, you can begin to see how important it is to have the right person on your side.

Find out if they are the right ‘fit’. The type of questions you might seek answers to include:

Can they ‘love’ your business the way you do?
Do they have the right attitude?
Are they willing to learn and can you work with them every day?

When you meet your account manager, why not interview them as if you were going to hire them. Check them out. At the very least check their LinkedIn profile. If you have concerns then say so. If you are happy, shout it out loud. Believe me, it works in your favour.

6. Big pond vs small pond.

It’s important to understand where you fit within an agency’s client hierarchy. Think about your own organisation for a moment. Not all clients are created equal. It’s sad but true. There’s a natural pecking order. It may not be discussed openly but it is a reality.

Squeaky wheels and big budgets generally prevail. But money isn’t everything.

Agencies may also value projects and clients that provide value in other ways apart from revenue. Things that may help an agency to grow. They could be show-case or ‘stretch’ projects, or projects that simply add to an agency’s ability to engage with community.

Understanding an agency’s client list and exactly where you fit within the spectrum will provide you with a perspective on how important your business is to the agency. It also provides insight into the level of service you can expect.

If you’re unsure, just ask, then listen to their response. You may be pleasantly surprised.

…and

Bonus tip - Ask around.

Here’s one more bonus tip for you. Perhaps it should even be the first thing you do. It’s the most obvious but it’s often the one that’s left to the end or left out all-together, maybe because you’ve been wooed and you’re falling in love. But love, they say, can be blind.

The reference process you adopt is extremely insightful and valuable. Don’t be backward in coming forward. You have every right to ask an agency for references to prove their credentials and verify whether their pre-sales story matches their modus operandi.

We all know that the best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour. This article in Psychology Today simply reminds us that this adage applies time and again. So why not do your homework?

Take the time to determine whether you have the right ‘fit’. Play your cards right and one day you may be the reference.

“Choose wisely, young Skywalker.”

Do you have any others suggestions for selecting the right digital agency and removing buyer’s remorse? We’d love to hear your experiences and thoughts. Good luck.

7 proven ways for not-for-profits to get more value out of digital fundraising campaigns.

Seven proven techniques to drive greater value from your digital fundraising campaigns.

Many not-for-profit organisations are conscious of generating the highest possible return on fundraising and marketing budgets. And rightly so.

Firstly, those budgets often come from hard-earned donation revenue.

I don’t use the term ‘hard-earned’ lightly. The not-for-profit sector is incredibly competitive—with over 66,000 registered charities competing for donor dollars in Australia—and fundraising can be difficult.

Secondly, there’s a strong public expectation that not-for-profit organisations always use any funds in the most efficient way possible.

In their research report Understanding Australian givers to maximise the impact of not-for-profit organisations, McCrindle research agency notes that: ‘for 70% of givers, keeping marketing and administrative costs low (below 20%) matters more to them than [seeing an organisation] grow overall donation revenue.’ To foster trust and credibility among your supporter base, it’s crucial you run efficient, highly effective campaigns that consistently deliver maximum value.

There’s also a simple sustainability equation to consider. It’s inherently problematic if your digital fundraising activity costs more to implement than it generates in donation revenue, and a clear sign that something needs to change.

If you ever find yourself in that boat, here are seven proven techniques that will drive greater value from your digital fundraising campaigns.

1. Minimise your reliance on third-party cookies for clearer data and improved campaign optimisation.

First up, it’s crucial to note that third-party cookies—a long-favoured approach for tracking website visitation and behaviour—are being phased out.

As data privacy becomes more prevalent as a serious public concern, third-party cookies have come under enormous scrutiny. Now, many of the larger tech heavyweights, like Google, Apple and Mozilla, are phasing out support.

This has wider implications you can read about here.

In the first instance though, now is the time to start thinking about first-party tracking solutions like Facebook’s Conversion API or server-side analytics.

Why? To run a successful digital fundraising campaign, it’s crucial you draw on clear and comprehensive data that your advertising platforms can self-optimise for.

2. Be mindful of how you define and configure conversion on different advertising channels.

The settings for each channel in your campaign should be configured to optimise for specific types of conversions. This approach recognises the distinct function of various channels within a prospect’s overall journey towards donating.

For example, almost all paid search activity should be optimised for a donation as the conversion. This is because paid search, as a channel, is about facilitation of intent.

Paid search is typically designed to connect with:

people actively searching for your organisation, or
people who have already made the decision to donate, and are in the final stages of selecting an organisation to receive that donation.

The same logic doesn’t apply to a platform like paid social, because it’s far rarer to see donations come directly through that channel. Here, it’s better to optimise for clicks or engagement with a view to remarketing, because social is about building awareness and interest in your organisation’s mission. Establishing an initial connection, with a view to a future conversion.

Remember, if you run fundraising campaigns through Meta ads, Google ads or a similar platform, it’s crucial to pass conversion data back into that platform.

Why? Many digital advertising platforms feature self-optimising ad serving mechanisms. If you configure these platforms with a clear definition of your goal and a series of variables to test (like ad creative, audience, placement, and many others) the platform will automatically refine the configuration most likely to deliver on your goal. To make the most of this feature, you need to set things up correctly from the start.

3. Recognise that your configuration should evolve throughout the duration of the campaign.

A good campaign is rarely a set-and-forget proposition.

Imagine you’re running a fundraising campaign to coincide with the end of financial year. This is a common—and often highly fruitful—initiative for organisations with Deductible Gift Recipient (DGR) status.

Your objectives should change over the course of a two-month campaign. As a result, so should your approach to campaign management.

Early stages of the campaign will likely focus on generating reach and awareness. You may test multiple audience segments to get a sense for traction; you might experiment with different stages of remarketing across different channels.

You may begin to see large volumes of traffic arrive to your site as a result of early activity to drive awareness. This is especially common with social advertising. You could use this traffic to build a remarketing list for another platform like Google Ads, ensuring that people will continue to see additional campaign imagery and messaging on other platforms like YouTube, Gmail, or display advertising.

This approach turns traffic which may not necessarily result in a first-time conversion into a potential future source of value.

Over time, the drive for donations should become more explicit, and remarketing can help in this capacity. As the campaign continues and you move closer to June 30, more people will donate. So it’s crucial that you stay top of mind and connect with people multiple times throughout the consideration phase as things ramp up.

The rule of seven—a classic idea in old and new school marketing—suggests people should be exposed to marketing messages seven times in order to trigger a behavioural change.

Remarketing ensures your campaign message will connect with warm prospects multiple times.

4. Appreciate the halo effect and know when to persist with a seemingly ‘underperforming’ channel.

Coined by American psychologist Edward Thorndike, the halo effect (sometimes known as the halo error) is a form of cognitive bias. It refers to the tendency for positive impressions of one commodity to positively or negatively influence feelings towards other commodities.

For example, if paid search is delivering a 22% conversion rate and paid social is delivering a 0.08% conversion rate, the halo effect may lead us to mistakenly conclude the channel with the lower conversion rate is redundant.

It’s important to acknowledge that no channel exists in a vacuum in the context of a fundraising campaign. Equally, attribution is rarely an exact science.

Sometimes, a certain channel or tactic may appear to underperform when compared with the superficial return-on-investment of another. Before making any snap judgement, it’s crucial to test whether that channel is playing an important function higher in the conversion funnel.

How might we test the importance of different traffic sources or channels? There are a couple of options, each with benefits and drawbacks.

Multi-channel attribution

This involves looking back across the traffic source for donors who visited the site multiple times before donating to see which channels were part of the journey.

However, the reliability of this data can be questionable. It’s challenging to track the same person across multiple devices, and the degradation of third-party cookies makes it hard to track users over time. Use of first-party tracking will make this type of reporting much more reliable in future.

Comparative analysis of previous campaigns

Another option is to look at the archive of campaigns your organisation has run previously. If last year’s Christmas campaign was run with a significant paid social effort, and another Christmas campaign was run with little-to-no paid social, the comparison could give you insight into paid social’s likely impact on bottom line.

However, this analysis is indicative only, and subject to a wide variety of uncontrolled variables, both internal and external.

5. Use a blend of Google Ad Grants and paid advertising.

For those that qualify, Google’s Ad Grants program is effectively a free addition to your budget.

It provides up to $13,000AUD per month in search advertising shown on Google, and the application process is straightforward and relatively quick to complete.

To meet the eligibility requirements, your organisation must:

Be registered with the Australian Charities and Nonprofits Commission (ACNC), or
Hold Deductible Gift Recipient (DGR) status within the Australian Taxation Office (ATO), or
Be income tax exempt for not-for-profit organisations as defined by the ATO.

Additional criteria stipulate that:

Your organisation is not a government entity.
Your organisation is not a hospital or healthcare provider.
Your organisation is not a school, academic institution or university (Google for Education offers a separate program).

While Google Grants can be a powerful supplement to your marketing budgets, it’s worth acknowledging that the program comes with certain constraints and limitations.

Google Grants are highly unlikely to perform in a competitive space, where multiple organisations are bidding on keywords that are not inherently tied to a single brand. ‘Animal charity donation’ is going to be contested by a wide range of charities, so Grants likely won’t have the desired impact. A term like ‘guide dogs Australia donation’ is less likely to be competitive, making Grants a more viable option.

Google Grants are also limited in terms of targeting and format. You can only run paid search through a Grant account, for example.

Most Grants shortcomings can be offset through paid advertising, so the ideal solution is to have both running in conjunction. The key thing is learning to distinguish when and how to use each of them, and how they can best work together.

Two tactics to try here include:

Create a similar campaign that is set up in both a Grants and paid account. Ensure Grants is on and paid is off during non-peak periods, and vice-versa during peak times.
Introduce campaigns and keywords into the Grants account. Then, based on your understanding of keyword volumes and the performance data Google Ads provides, migrate any underperforming keywords or ad groups into your paid account.

6. Invest in Microsoft Ads.

Microsoft Ads run on Bing, the default browser installed on every PC device. As an observation, many people over 50 will buy PC devices (given most people this age were introduced to using computers prior to the Mac revolution) and rarely replace the default browser.

This age group is also a highly valuable donor bracket (for both conversion rate and average value of donation).

Plus, Bing is—generally speaking—less competitive than Google Ads. It’s a smaller search engine in terms of user base, but it punches well above its weight when comparing fundraising advertising options.

For a potentially lower investment, you can connect with a highly valuable donor demographic and deliver a significant windfall.

7. Optimise for higher value conversions, not just conversions in and of themselves.

This sounds obvious, but it can represent an untapped goldmine.

Sometimes, when you’re so focused on specific campaign objectives, you can miss the forest for the trees. Or, focus so intently on engaging new supporters and nourishing them on the path to conversion that you neglect to optimise for the highest donation possible.

A/B testing becomes particularly important in this approach.

In A/B testing, you compare two versions of the same landing page (or donation form) over a period of time to determine which delivers more value.

There are many different things you can augment or optimise to invite a higher donation amount. You could:

Test different variants of microcopy to tell a more engaging story about how donations are used by the organisations.
Test and reorder the donation amounts from highest to lowest or change the minimum amount you suggest.
Add imagery, graphics or animations to the donation form.

So, there you have it, seven techniques to help you get more value from fundraising campaigns.

If you’d like help implementing any of the above—or running a donation or advocacy campaign in general—give me a call or flick through a contact message.

There’s nothing I find more interesting and rewarding than supporting not-for-profit organisations to achieve their mission.

Good microcopy: the marketing afterthought that creates a massive impact for NFPs.

This supposedly tiny consideration can have a significant impact on your marketing goals — here’s how a little bit of craft goes a long way.

Marketing teams in not-for-profits have a huge remit.

If you’re in design and content production, your interest is likely divided across:

Writing and producing fresh website content, like campaign pages, news articles, media releases, event wrap-ups, and more.
Conceptualising advocacy campaigns to elicit support on key issues.
Developing eDMs, social media material, and other outbound content to connect with your supporters.

To make things more complicated, you may be creating all of these content types in a single day, with shifting deadlines, priorities and approvals processes.

So, it’s completely understandable that a seemingly minor consideration—something like writing microcopy—can fall by the wayside.

But the thing is, this supposedly tiny consideration can have a significant impact on contributing to your marketing goals.

How significant, you ask? This example highlights that a simple change in phrasing from ‘Request a quote’ to ‘Request pricing’ saw a 161.66% increase in clicks.

There’s research from Nielsen Norman Group that suggests well-structured website copy contributes to 124% better results in supporting people to achieve their goals.

The evidence is clear: when it comes to microcopy, a little bit of craft goes a long way.

What do we mean by ‘microcopy’?

According to this excellent overview from Anja Wedberg at UX Writing Hub, microcopy is: ‘the small text snippets that guide us through websites, apps, and other digital experiences. It comes in many shapes and forms, but it has a common goal: to help people navigate through a digital product or service as smoothly as possible.’

I’d add to that definition by suggesting microcopy always serves a functional purpose.

Unlike editorial copy (which is designed to articulate an idea or perspective on an issue), or branding copy (which intends to elicit an emotional response in relation to a product, service or concept), microcopy is all about supporting people—or getting people—to do something.

Microcopy comes in the form of:

Call-to-action (CTA) buttons throughout a website, eDM, or social media campaign.
Donation handles in online donation forms (for those unfamiliar, the suggested dollar amounts you can contribute when selecting how much you’d like to give).
Error or success messages in forms: for example, a newsletter signup form.
Loading messages that tell you something is happening in the system.
404-pages.

In each of these applications, there are specific techniques non-profit organisations can use to increase the likelihood someone will complete a desired action; whether it’s to donate, sign-up to a mailing list, volunteer, support a petition, or anything else.

Use action-oriented words.

Why? Well, it’s called a ‘call-to-action’ for a reason. You’re trying to incentivise someone to act.

Most people who visit your site or view your collateral—whether they’re long-term established advocates or newly discovering your mission—will feel some level of personal association with your cause. That’s why they’re reading your content.

By using passionate action-oriented language, you will either:

Mirror their own existing energy and enthusiasm, or
Nudge them from consideration towards full support.

When you write conversion-focused microcopy, always start your CTA with a verb. This makes it clear what action the person triggers by clicking the button.

As an additional tip, provide some compelling pre-text in close proximity to the CTA. Like this example below, from Sea Shepherd.

Sea Shepherd’s ‘no fishing’ campaign website features some compelling microcopy.

The pre-text is particularly compelling here because it subtly positions the reader as being the central actor in creating change. By simply clicking the button, you become the hero of this story.

‘If nothing is done, there won’t be anything left’. Psychologically, there’s an unspoken implication: those who don’t ‘take action’ are comfortable doing nothing, and complicit in the slide towards a future where there’s nothing left.

So, will you do nothing? Or will you click the button?

This leads perfectly to the next technique…

Tell a small, emotive story with your microcopy.

Why? As a non-profit, your mission is crucial. It’s how supporters connect and align themselves with your organisation.

Your story is your secret weapon: you should find opportunities to reiterate your mission in every facet of your website. This will reassure your supporters of why they’re here and highlight their importance in facilitating crucial impact.

It doesn’t have to be overt or overdone. A simple nod is enough.

For example, research suggests many of Guide Dogs’ donors are motivated to support dogs and puppies in training, so the dollar handles in their donation form (see below) reiterate how different contributions provide value for the dogs in different ways.

Beyond microcopy, the animated icons are a nice touch that helps with storytelling, eliciting an emotional response, and driving conversions too.

Animated dollar handles in one of Guide Dogs’ donation forms.

Jai Dog Rescue, an organisation devoted to transforming the lives of street dogs in Thailand, have an ever-present ‘donate’ button that tracks down the right-hand side of their homepage. The microcopy here reiterates the organisation’s valuable work, while perfectly aligning with the likely motivation of most people visiting the site: ‘100% of your donation is spent on what matters most: transforming lives of dogs in need’.

Jai Dog Rescue uses microcopy to reiterate its mission for prospective donors.

The Royal Women’s Hospital includes some incredibly compelling stories in their donation form. These stories not only reiterate the value of your potential contribution, but serve to spark a deeper emotional connection to different causes that may resonate with donors.

Microcopy in the Royal Women’s Hospital’s donation form.

The National Breast Cancer Foundation uses a slight variation on this theme. While there’s no microcopy directly against each dollar value within the donation form, there is supporting material to describe the types of research a donation will fund. The point is there’s a narrative component associated with the function of donating, which connects back to why taking action is important.

The National Breast Cancer Foundation highlighting the impact associated with donations.

Here’s another example from Animals Australia (please note, some people may find imagery in the link distressing). This is a call-to-action encouraging people to send a petition that calls for an end to live export.

Animals Australia uses microcopy to express the core emotional message of the call-to-action.

Rather than simply highlighting the functional intention of this form—‘Sign our petition’—Animals Australia uses microcopy to articulate the ultimate emotional proposition that underpins the action behind the form: ‘Save animals from cruelty’.

This approach connects more with the motivations of the supporter, is far more meaningful to them, and is significantly more likely to drive the desired action.

There’s also this example on a 404-page from Jesuit Social Services. The typical function of a 404-page is to simply indicate there is no corresponding page within the domain of the website you’re on. Basically, you’ve hit a dead end and the page you’re seeking doesn’t exist.

Jesuits Social Services uses its 404-page to tell a story.

Jesuit Social Services use the messaging on its 404-page as an opportunity to reiterate its mission. Through the power of a nicely crafted micro-story, this approach turns a potentially negative experience into a surprise moment of delight: providing a chance for people to learn more about the organisation’s mission and purpose.

Be hyper-specific.

Why? This one pertains to accessibility. Specificity of labelling is an important consideration for accessibility, among many other factors.

By labelling buttons and call-to-actions with some clue as to the function of that button—like ‘learn about our services’ rather than simply ‘learn more’—you can provide more context for people with different abilities, like low vision, blindness, or variance in cognitive ability.

This is important; in a hyper-competitive fundraising landscape, your website needs to connect with and support as many people as possible.

As an added bonus, it’s a small thing that can contribute to a feeling of trust and transparency. Also, the more descriptive you are with button labels, the more likely you are to find opportunities to allude to the narrative of your mission (see the above point about small, emotive stories).

Below is another great example from Guide Dogs. Rather than relying on a single general catch-all like ‘see our services’, each of these buttons speaks to a very specific goal or impulse that aligns with the motivation of the visitor. Of course, ‘see all services’ is still there for those that want to see a full list of everything.

Guide Dogs’ CTAs for services speak to different impulses and goals.

On the Critical Danger website, which raises funds and awareness for charities supporting critically endangered animals, minimalistic CTAs are dotted throughout the single page site experience.

Although the CTAs here are small, they find ways to command attention.

Nestled among gorgeous photography and some nicely crafted animations, the CTAs are incredibly specific: ‘Visit the IUCN Red List.’ In addition to the benefits highlighted above, there are elements of education and curiosity at play here too. What is the IUCN list? What animals are on the list? What additional information does the list offer? For such a small CTA in the context of this site, it provides multiple incentives for your click. ‘Read more’ simply doesn’t provide the same value.

Make it consistent and clear across multiple touchpoints.

Why? There might be multiple steps in eliciting a conversion.

You may have social media ads, paid search, or an eDM campaign that links through to a conversion-focused landing page.

Whatever the steps involved in getting people to your site and encouraging their support, you’ll have a better chance at success by making it as easy, consistent, and clear as possible at every point of the journey.

Without clear signals guiding people toward the next step, you run the risk of drop-offs at each point in the process.

In the examples below, it’s perfectly clear that you’re about to provide support for Animals Australia’s ‘Be their Hero’ campaign as you transition from the eDM to the landing page. There’s clear consistency in the language so you immediately know you’re in the right place and how to contribute after clicking on the email CTA.

The click-through CTA in the email invites readers to ‘Keep ‘Be their Hero’ on TV’…

Before the landing page clearly encourages people to join and support the cause: ‘Yes! I want to help keep this TV ad on air’.

How do you know if it’s good microcopy? Test it.

Writing in accordance with these principles will help you craft better microcopy. But the best—and in fact only—way to establish whether it’s ‘good’ or not is to test it.

Remember, microcopy should serve a functional purpose; it should encourage a conversion. With that in mind, we can use A/B testing to hone the efficacy of microcopy in various instances throughout a website or campaign.

In an A/B test, we might write two donation CTAs for Guide Dogs:

Give now and support Guide Dogs in training
Play a crucial role in supporting puppies

We can then send a portion of traffic to one CTA and a portion of traffic to the other, measuring which one has the higher conversion rate. We might establish that 1-in-6 visitors will donate to the first CTA, while 1-in-10 will donate to the second.

You should always continually test and optimise your microcopy based on analytics, to ensure the most impactful approach possible.

Does your microcopy miss the mark?

If you’ve never thought about microcopy in this level of detail, you could be leaving value on the table. The great news? It’s never too late to write good microcopy. There are simple things you can do right now to capitalise on improved conversions.

Encourage action.
Tell a story.
Be hyper-specific.
Make it consistent.
Test and validate.

There’s plenty more beyond that too.

For the time being though, let’s stay true to the focus of this article: Get the small, simple things right and you’ll start to unlock serious value.

Building a highly effective website brief in a multi-stakeholder NFP environment.

How do you align a room full of competing priorities before a single pixel is built? Context sheets offer a potent, efficient way through.

It’s always exciting being on the cusp of building or redeveloping a website. Opportunity abounds. The potential is limitless. And everyone is brimming with ideas.

Concurrently though, everyone is also brimming with different—sometimes competing—priorities. There are different objectives across disparate teams or business units. There are stakeholders who are crucial to the success of the project, but who may not be overly familiar with what it takes to build an effective website product. Or, equally, how to ask for what they need in order for the site to best serve their interests.

Some people throughout the organisation actually want the same thing but ask for it in different ways. One person’s ‘content hub’ is another person’s ‘interactive digital resource platform’.

Typically, there will be some reference sites thrown into the mix to serve as inspiration; a benchmark for what the new site could or should be. It all looks sleek and polished, and everyone’s excitement levels rise again.

For all the excitement though, there are challenges on the horizon. They can’t be overcome by simply adding everyone’s wish list into a Google doc and pushing forward.

History is littered with cautionary tales highlighting the perils of design by committee.

Take the Pontiac Aztek for example. Built through an intentional process of ‘design by committee’, the Aztek was a commercial disaster for General Motors in the early 2000s. It’s still universally derided as one of the ugliest cars ever produced.

If the project starts now, things will only get more challenging as time rolls on. Any variance between teams and stakeholders will only compound and resonate throughout the delivery of the project. And at this point, there can be significant variance.

Unpacking the challenges of crafting a brief.

First up, it’s worth defining key terminology (pro tip: this is also one of the first things to do when crafting a brief).

What do we mean by ‘multi-stakeholder NFP environment’?

There’s no hard or fast definition, but for the purpose of this piece, let’s talk in the context of a newly federated national charity.

A federated model consists of a single national presence that operates registered, independent local branches. Most national Australian not-for-profits and charities are structured as federations, like Foodbank and Cystic Fibrosis Australia. Many sporting bodies are federated too.

There’s evidence to suggest that thousands of these organisations could benefit from the efficiencies of consolidation.

“In particular the Community Council for Australia and other peak bodies have been calling upon charities to consider merging... in a bid to reduce competition for increasingly limited funding.” – Clarissa Sukkar

Guide Dogs provides a great example of how the members of a federation can work together.

Originally, there were multiple state-based branches with individual brands, teams, and processes: Guide Dogs Queensland, Guide Dogs South Australia, and so on.

Following a unification project, they all moved together to pool resources and leverage efficiencies under a single, cohesive national banner.

Understandably, the website was a crucial part of this process. Five distinct, individual teams—each with their own sites—came together under the one banner.

This inevitably means navigating:

Legacy business processes, functionalities, and systems.
Different priorities and budgetary constraints.
Differences in expectation of what can be delivered, or different benchmarks against budgets.
Different ways of providing and articulating services.
Different expectations of what the new website could or should do for the organisation.
Potentially, different cultures and variable interests or motivations within those cultures. For example, working with a range of non-profits, it’s common for fundraising teams to build out new initiatives and continually annex them to an existing base of functionality. This approach can create short-term wins but ultimately contribute to long-term entropy. On the other hand, marketing teams often do the opposite, taking a more consistent and cohesive approach that fundraising teams may deem ineffectual, given more aggressive revenue targets.

It is absolutely critical to navigate these challenges before you build anything.

And in a not-for-profit environment, where donations and fundraising dollars are hard-earned and government funding can be scrutinised, maximising the value of every dollar is crucial.

Context sheets: a potent and efficient way to build a brief in complex, multi-stakeholder environments.

‘Context sheets’—a co-design tool run via a workshop format—is an incredibly effective way to align a wide variety of stakeholders throughout your organisation.

Everyone from CEOs to client-facing service providers can, and should, participate. At the very least, there should be a representative from every key stakeholder group affected by the website project. This could be anywhere from five to 25 people; some teams, like Mercy Health, have even run multiple versions of the same workshop with a core group of consistent attendees to accommodate larger stakeholder numbers.

By the end of the facilitated session, which takes far less time than it would for your team to compile and write a brief, all key stakeholders will have a comprehensive understanding and documented outline of the project, with:

Consolidated alignment on what the work involves.
A thorough understanding of why the project is important for the organisation, along with any unique objectives for various stakeholders and a sense of priority for those objectives.
How the success of the project will be measured.
Risks and challenges the team may face as a collective.
Acknowledgement of any platforms or technologies that must be considered throughout the project, whether existing or desired in the future.
Visibility of any constraints, including budgets, deadlines, or unique processes that are critical to the delivery of the work (for example, the legal or regulatory review of certain aspects of website content).
How far to push the envelope in the work, and the team’s shared appetite for risk in doing so.

This is all achieved with little more than a room of project stakeholders, eight large sheets of paper, two coloured markers, and an experienced team to facilitate and document the conversations. The process typically takes about three hours.

Here’s what it looks like in action:

Building on proven frameworks for learning and alignment.

This design tool is uniquely designed to ‘flatten the room’. That is, to eliminate the variance in the team’s collective understanding of the project. It is crucial this is done in an open, collaborative forum.

In order to truly flatten the room, context sheets draw on a number of proven techniques to momentarily suspend organisational hierarchies, power dynamics, and other barriers that can impede effective communication and collaboration between multidisciplinary teams.

The experience is predicated on psychological and pedagogical frameworks that help people most accurately process and retain information.

These include:

The flipped classroom: a type of blended learning which aims to increase engagement and knowledge retention. Rather than have a sole voice as the leader of the ‘lesson’ or meeting, the flipped classroom intentionally shifts instruction to a participant-led dynamic. This approach leads to interactions that explore topics in greater depth to create more ingrained and meaningful learning opportunities, rather than passive knowledge transmission from ‘teacher’ to ‘student’. Alison King’s 1993 work ‘From Sage on the Stage to Guide on the Side’—while not a directly articulating the flipped classroom approach—explores the importance of using interactions for construction of meaning rather than knowledge transmission.
The Socratic learning method: a form of cooperative dialogue between individuals, based on asking and answering questions in specific formats to stimulate critical thinking and to draw out ideas and underlying presumptions.
The VAK learning styles model*: developed by psychologists in the 1920s, this model suggests that most people learn in one of three ways, being ‘visual’, ‘auditory’, or ‘kinesthetic’.
- Visually dominant learners absorb and retain information better when it is presented in some visual form. The workshop features large sheets with easy-to-read handwriting in thick marker to cater to visually dominant learners. The handwriting captured on the sheets is used to document key points from the participants’ conversation.
- Auditory-dominant learners prefer listening to what is being presented. These learners respond best to people describing concepts in conversation. As a facilitated dialogue between stakeholders and delivery team members, the workshop format perfectly caters to auditory-dominant learners.
- Kinesthetic-dominant learners prefer to learn through physical, tactile experiences. This is why handwritten content is added to the sheets over time; the team literally ‘builds’ the brief based on key information offered up throughout the discussion.
It is worth nothing the learning styles model has been contested in its original form, and new perspectives suggest learning styles are perhaps less important than facilitating meaningful connections between new and existing knowledge. Whichever perspective you subscribe to, context sheets provide an experience that aligns with the learning styles model while supporting the connection of old and new information. Ultimately, this leads to far more effective encoding of ideas and information for participants.

Why is it so important that we have open, collaborative, and documented conversations to calibrate a shared understanding of the work?

Imagine a scenario. You’re in a traditional briefing session where every attendee writes their own personal notes in reflection of the conversation. Any discrepancy between peoples’ understanding of the project is rarely identified, let alone broached.

What happens when the team members from that session return to their teams, and the discrepancy of understanding echoes throughout the organisation? Confusion abounds. The higher the likelihood of confusion in delivery, the greater the chance for errors, misalignment, and potentially expensive rework.

Conversely, context sheets act as a singular, shared collection of detailed notes that stakeholders validate together.

This is crucial to the success of the brief because it ensures the team will:

Uncover all past conversations and information, rather than one individual’s perception of what is important.
Create a forum for cross-disciplinary conversations that need to happen.
Make expectations, roles and responsibilities explicit and ensure that all people commit to agreed outcomes via the VAK learning model.
Increase ownership and engagement for different people involved in the project.

Building a brief is a delicate balancing act that requires a robust, proven process.

The way you construct your brief is absolutely critical to the success of your campaign or website project. At the same time, it’s an incredibly delicate balancing act to navigate.

This is because:

Not enough structure or clarity can result in misalignment, expensive rework, wasted time, and disenfranchised teams or stakeholders.
Too much structure—provided by too few voices—runs the risk of being prescriptive, reductive, or missing opportunities and challenges that other voices may have been able to contribute.
Too many voices, without any agreement on hierarchy, weighting, or priority results in design by committee. And as we’ve established, very few people want to end up with a Pontiac Aztek.

When there’s so much at stake, it’s worth investing in a proven, replicable process. One that’s backed by research and sound evidence base, and has been used to great effect by marketing teams in some of Australia’s largest and most loved non-profits.

Context sheets tick every box.

Three unexpected benefits design systems offer for NFPs.

Beyond consistency and efficiency at scale, design systems deliver organisational benefits that add value far beyond ‘on-the-tools’ implementation.

If you’re considering implementing a design system, you’re likely aware they offer consistency and efficiency at scale.

These benefits are well documented. In fact, they’re often the two key drivers behind the decision to adopt a design system in the first place.

In many cases, teams will implement a design system to formalise the way they approach brand and design language. With the right ingredients, the system will minimise wastage and variance in output when assets are produced by multiple teams at scale.

But it doesn’t end there.

There are many more additional—and perhaps unexpected—organisational benefits that add value far beyond ‘on-the-tools’ implementation.

1. Retain intellectual property within your organisation, protect against ‘key person risk’, and help with on-boarding new team members.

We’ve likely all experienced similar scenarios.

“Is this on brand?”… “Hmm, better check with Sophie.”
“What are our system fonts again, Sophie?”
“Hey Soph—do we ever use black and white imagery in campaign emails?”

And then Soph leaves the team.

Without documentation of best practice and brand applications, there’s always the lingering risk of losing intellectual or procedural capital when there are personnel changes in the team.

This is because, without a formalised design system, critical knowledge stays with individual team members.

When you have a design system in place, there is no risk of knowledge staying with a few key people.

To be effective, design systems must be inherently transparent and universally accessible. Some organisations even make their design systems publicly accessible, like Audi.

A design system doesn’t have to be publicly available, but it does need to be freely accessible for everyone in your team. Everyone needs to understand the importance of your guidelines and have quick, easy access to information about design conventions in order to uphold them.

Implemented and maintained appropriately, a design system will ensure more people are empowered with clear, explicit, and descriptive guidelines.

While this significantly lessens the disruption that can arise when key people leave, it also makes it far easier to maintain continuity when new team members arrive.

With descriptive guidelines in place—supported by clear rationale highlighting the importance of those guidelines—there’s no ambiguity about design language or brand application.

As a result, new team members can get up to speed quickly and hit the ground running.

2. Improve brand and digital literacy across your broader team.

A rising tide lifts all boats.

Providing guidelines for a range of technical considerations like accessibility—which are universally visible to everyone in the team—creates a scenario where more team members are mindful of these considerations in their daily roles.

Shopify’s design system, Polaris, includes an entire section to ensure accessible design and development practice is factored into everything they build.

Similarly, Animals Australia’s design system, called Habitat, includes guidelines for writing alt text for images.

Alt text is an accessibility consideration that describes the appearance or function of images throughout website content. It provides descriptive signals for people using assistive technologies like screen readers (typically people with blindness or low vision), so they can understand the content and intent of imagery.

Being able to highlight common conventions for alt text means more people in the team are likely to understand what it is and why it’s important. And thus, far more likely to implement alt text when creating website content.

Without these shared visible conventions, there’s a greater chance people may not be mindful of alt text at all.

This is a relatively minor example. But when you have many of these techniques and considerations documented throughout the design system (like requirements for optimising images, conventions for interaction and animation styles, grids and spacing for design layout, best-practice tips for creating emails) your teams—and their output—will be infinitely better.

3. Free up senior team members to focus on more strategic, high level marketing work.

The most senior and experienced minds in your organisation are better deployed on marketing, rather than in marketing.

These team members should spend time doing things like:

Exploring new initiatives, platforms or channels to engage.
Looking for ways to improve connections with new or established audiences.
Contributing to strategic direction, like the types of social or community issues that may be relevant for digital advocacy campaigns.
Considering new macro level processes to improve the output of teams (like the decision to develop and implement a design system, for example).

Without the right structures or guidelines in place, these senior team members can be caught up in work that is equally important, but less commensurate with their skillset. This includes:

Reviewing work to assess whether it aligns with brand and marketing objectives.
Providing feedback or rationale to reiterate the fundamental objectives of the brand.

With the right guidelines in place, design systems can do some of this heavy lifting by highlighting best practice via a single source of truth for multiple teams.

They can also provide conceptual rigour that makes feedback less ambiguous. In other words, you can point to an established set of guidelines to determine whether something aligns with the brand.

A noted example of this second point is the six key pillars of Steve Jobs’ design philosophy.

The six key pillars of Steve Jobs’ design philosophy.

The pillars that Jobs’ used to inform Apple’s design approach were:

Craft above all: involving meticulous attention to detail and consideration of every aspect of whatever is being created.
Empathy: any process or interface should empathise with the needs and goals of the user, in order to preempt and align closely with their needs.
Focus: find ways to pare things back and eliminate anything that can be deemed unnecessary.
Impute: be mindful of the signals conveyed by the product. This excerpt from a company-wide memo articulates the value: “we may have the best product, the highest quality and the most useful software. But if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod. If we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities.”
Friendliness: high-tech devices can be friendly and approachable, and should equally appeal to people who are not ‘technologically inclined’.
Find simplicity for the future in metaphors from the past: In order for things to be simple and easy to use, they should be based on things that people already understand.

By documenting these pillars and making them available for everyone in the team, Jobs inevitably spent less time articulating his vision for the brand and more time delivering it.

These were the known and accepted conventions that defined Apple products. Any proposed design that contravened these principles was unlikely to be approved.

As he didn’t have to continuously provide the same feedback—because the baseline output of the team defaulted to align more closely with his vision—Jobs was freed to work on higher level priorities for Apple.

A good design system will empower your team and improve your organisation.

With the right elements and processes in place, a design system can have significant impact: both for the team who use it daily and the wider organisation as a whole.

Design systems can act as an acute remedy, adding immediate structure, consistency and efficiency to environments that lack formalised design conventions.

But they can also remedy more chronic organisational challenges, by helping to:

Minimise the impact of staff turnover in marketing and creative teams.
Promote higher standards and skill development for ancillary team members.
Contribute to more appropriate resource allocation.

Over time, the impact of these two-tier positives can be substantial. If you’re on the cusp of implementing a design system, expect the unexpected benefits.

Why NFPs should move from ‘audiences’ to ‘communities’.

While building a large audience is crucial, a community can add additional dimensions of value. So what exactly is that value?

If building a sizeable, passionate and committed audience is your only priority, you could be shortchanging your supporters. And denying yourself of value.

That sounds dramatic, but it’s true.

While building a large audience is crucial—for progress towards your mission, for organisational stability, for reach and recruitment of supporters—a community can add additional dimensions of value.

This first begs the question: what is the difference?

Understanding the difference between an audience and a community.

There are some important distinctions.

An audience is defined by one-to-many communication. Typically, you project messages outwardly towards your audience, and the members of that audience receive them. A community is defined by many-to-many communication: you might lead a conversation or provide the overarching themes to guide participation, but highly engaged and participatory community members will contribute and generate their own responses.

An audience is receptive. An audience will respond to the content you produce for them. A community is generative: community members will produce content among and for each other. The insights gleaned from this material can even influence the type of messaging or campaigns you produce for your wider audience.

Audiences are largely impersonal in nature; communities are predicated on understanding and connecting with individual people. As an extension of this idea, audiences can be purchased. Communities are based on relationships, and must be earned.

In building and maintaining an audience, it is unlikely your organisational goals or priorities will change. When you foster a community, there are opportunities to pivot organisational goals and priorities in line with feedback or insights gleaned from the community.

Building an audience is a short term and more conservative approach. Building a community is more ambitious: there are risks involved, but the outcomes and value can far exceed your expectations.

So, what exactly is that value?

Here are some examples of the significant benefits that communities can deliver for not-for-profit organisations.

1. Learn from your supporters and better align with their needs and expectations.

Having a large, established audience is enormously beneficial. But it’s also defined by a top-down communication dynamic.

You create and publish material which your audience will consume. You provide services which your audience can choose whether or not to engage in.

The shift to a community creates a more reciprocal and participatory model. By fostering a community, you can hear directly from your supporters to establish clear insights into:

The challenges they face.
What they want or need from your organisation.
Specific initiatives, causes, content types, or potential new service offerings that appeal to them.

This exchange—and the learnings you glean—can be explicit or implied.

With an established community in place, you can literally ask for feedback about any of the services you provide.

You could even ask about the way you manage or support the community you’re engaging, like Beyond Blue does in their community forums.

Beyond Blue asks for feedback on how they can better run and maintain their community forums.

Alternatively, if you have the right tracking and data analysis configuration, you can infer feedback from the behaviour of community members over time.

For example, CatchUp—Guide Dogs’ social networking and support platform for people with low vision or blindness—offers a social groups section with conversations about cooking: recipes, tips and techniques, assistive technologies for people to use in the kitchen, and more.

If this is one of the most frequently visited and highly engaged areas of the platform, that might indicate potential groundswell for a training course on cooking classes.

An engaged community provides access to an ‘always-on’ (and always honest) market research channel.

When you have access to an engaged and forthcoming community, you can be more engaged and proactive in the way you support your entire supporter base.

2. Connect with new people and provide a crucial interim support for those who aren’t ready to engage in face-to-face services.

This benefit is specific to a certain type of not-for-profit organisation. Communities are especially valuable for support services and community health providers like Cancer Council, Guide Dogs, ReachOut, or Lifeline.

For people navigating the challenges associated with grief, anxiety, depression, or a difficult diagnosis with their physical health, empathetic peer-to-peer exchanges can offer invaluable support.

Research suggests people are increasingly comfortable turning to online communities to seek help with loneliness, isolation, anxiety, and more. Moreover, people experiencing serious mental health challenges report benefits from interacting with peers online.

By engaging with and learning from peers online, people can gain important insight into healthcare decisions. Over time, this can contribute to more confidence and comfort with in-person service seeking behaviour.

A supportive online community can act as an important long-term conduit for people who may never have otherwise sought to engage a service provider.

There are two benefits here:

In the short term, the community itself can act as a crucial support for people to access on their own terms.
Longer term, as these people become more comfortable with the prospect of seeking face-to-face support, fostering a community can be seen as an investment in future in-person service delivery.

3. Create strong, long-lasting emotional bonds with new supporters and ensure people think of your organisation when they’re ready to engage.

Brand salience is a concept developed by Professor Jenni Romaniuk and Professor Byron Sharp, both acclaimed authors and Directors at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute of Marketing Science.

It refers to ‘the propensity of a brand to be thought of in a buying situation, reflected in the quantity and quality of the network of brand information in a person’s memory, or the brand’s share of mind.’

When you commit to build a community, members will likely come from two main sources:

1. Existing members of your audience—who are likely already passionate advocates for your organisation—join and support the community simply because it is your initiative.

2. Entirely new members come to the community for the content generated by the community, drawn to the value of peer-to-peer engagement with people who share their perspectives or circumstances.

For people who fall into this second category, your organisation is merely seen as a facilitator for the community. In this case, any consideration of brand is likely a secondary proposition.

Over time however, this dynamic will shift. As the shift occurs, brand salience becomes an important and valuable factor.

Consider a hypothetical scenario.

A young woman, Laura, struggles with the pressures of her final year at high school. Without fully understanding the nature or reason why she feels a certain way, she Googles some of the feelings she’s experiencing and discovers a community forum. It’s run by an organisation called PositiveMindSupport.

As Laura reads through the forums and begins to contribute to discussions, peer experts offer support, techniques to help manage her challenges, and suggest the value of speaking to a qualified support person. Laura is hesitant about reaching out for in-person support, but learns a huge amount from the community and manages to successfully navigate her final exams.

Years later, an unexpected death in the family re-triggers the same difficult feelings. This time, Laura is more open to the prospect of in-person support.

The concept of brand salience suggests a higher likelihood that Laura will reach out to PositiveMindSupport for in-person support, based on this organisation occupying a higher share of memory compared to other competing providers.

Now, consider that Laura is just one visitor to a community with 40,000 members. When people derive valuable support from a community, there’s a residual positive connection made with the facilitator of that community. Over time—and at scale—this can result in your organisation connecting with more people to provide valuable support services for far greater benefit.

Are you ready to embrace and capitalise on the benefits of community?

While growing your audience is important, communities can offer compelling new benefits in both the short and long term. And both for community members and facilitators alike.

Building a community is a potent way to foster and engage your existing supporters in new ways, to differentiate yourself from any comparator organisations, and to build valuable new connections.

So, what are you waiting for? Let’s build one.

5 surprisingly easy ways to connect with diverse audiences as a social services provider.

How do you connect with such variable audiences and accommodate each person’s distinctive needs? Here are some proven techniques to consider.

Australia is home to incredibly diverse communities. Together, we come from all kinds of backgrounds and contexts.

Equally, we all have different circumstances, with varying needs and requirements for support. 30% of our population was born overseas and 22% speak a language other than English at home. One in six Australians live with a disability, with around 519,000 people on the National Disability Insurance Scheme. 5.1 million people receive some form of income support. 44% of people aged 18-65 in Australia will experience a mental health challenge or disorder at some point in their life.

Social services providers play a key role in supporting people with different contexts to navigate important social, economic, and health-related issues. And while our collective diversity is something to celebrate, it can also create challenges—and opportunities—for marketers.

How do you connect with such variable audiences and accommodate each person’s distinctive needs or preferences? How do you articulate what you do, when many social services providers are many things to many groups and people?

Here are some proven techniques to consider, honed through working with a range of organisations from the social services sector.

1. Ensure you’re easy to find based on how people actually search for your services.

In order to connect with and support your audiences, you need to be readily available when—and how—they look for you. This means catering to some potential variance in how people are likely to articulate your services, or the search intent they will use to try to find the right support.

While the terminology and language that many organisations use is always appropriately person-centred, aligning with best practice, the general public may not be as progressive or considered when searching for help. Especially if they are in some state of distress.

For example, while a service provider might say ‘support services for people experiencing homelessness’, a person who is actively looking for help might write ‘services for homeless people’ or simply ‘homeless support’.

This phenomenon is also relevant for terminology with things like funding reforms. In 2013, when the Australian Government introduced Home Care Packages for aged care services, there may have been a period where people still searched for legacy terminology, like ‘Community Aged Care Program’.

To overcome this variance and connect with people at the critical moment, you might run search ads that bid on a variety of terms. This will ensure your organisation is present on a search result page regardless of the language people use.

It’s important to ensure that any content page tied to a paid search ad closely and immediately aligns with the intent behind the searcher’s query. If it’s not immediately self-evident that people are in the right place, you’ll see a high bounce rate (whereby people land on the page and leave immediately without any meaningful interaction). Google’s ranking algorithm is also likely to determine your content doesn’t directly respond to the intent, you’ll get a low quality rating in its system, and your ad will be made less visible.

2. Make content available in a variety of languages and formats to accommodate culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities.

Social services providers offer support for all kinds of people from diverse and multicultural communities.

In order to be effective, website and marketing content needs to:

Provide information for people in a language they understand,
At a level or in a format they can comprehend,
From a source that is trustworthy and credible. For more on the role of design in building trust, check out this article.

A polyformat approach to content can deliver against all of these objectives. For example, in its ‘Communication Guide to integrating culturally, ethnically, and linguistically diverse communities in rapid responses to public health crises’, the Migration Council of Australia—the national settlement peak body that supports better settlement outcomes for Australia’s migrants and refugees—highlights that ‘images, animations and videos increase understanding of healthcare information for people in CALD user groups. This is enhanced when those images are culturally sensitive and include representation of individuals and communities from their background’.

Aligning with this approach doesn’t necessarily require an enormous investment into content production. There are small considerations and techniques you can implement that accumulatively contribute to accessible experiences for people from CALD groups.

For example, Jesuit Social Services features illustrations of people from various community groups in the visual language of its design system.

Some of the illustrations featured throughout the Jesuit Social Services website.

The website’s navigation features visual icons to provide helpful cues to guide people towards the right information.

The website’s navigation features visual iconography to help people understand support service offerings and how they may be relevant for different needs or communities.

And, the site offers content in multiple languages—including Arabic, Oromo, Somali, Tigrinya, Tibetan and Vietnamese—and caters to both non-Roman alphabets and right-to-left scripts.

3. Be equitable and inclusive in your approach to representation.

This means taking an inclusive approach to the people and communities who are represented in your marketing imagery. Diverse media representation is beneficial on multiple levels.

Firstly, from a service access perspective, including imagery of culturally and linguistically diverse communities helps people to ‘see themselves in services’. This can make it easier and more efficient for someone to validate that a support service is relevant to their needs and can equally help in overcoming any challenges associated with language or literacy.

There is evidence that people prefer pictures in health messages that are culturally sensitive and include representations of people like themselves. This study suggests people are more likely to notice these messages, increasing the likelihood that people will engage with the service when it is needed.

At the same time, equitable representation contributes to a higher societal benefit: positive media representation can be helpful in increasing self-esteem for people of marginalized groups, and especially young people.

Intergroup Contact Theory—developed in the 1950s by Dr. Gordon Allport—suggests the more exposure or contact people have with groups who are different to themselves, the higher the likelihood of acceptance of that group. It is hailed as one of the most studied and successful prejudice reduction strategies in the social sciences. ‘Mediated contact’, as an extension of the original Intergroup Contact Theory, is proven to create positive effects on both explicit and implicit attitudes and improves intergroup relations in a range of ways.

In other words, according to research, inclusive imagery, video, and marketing materials contribute to a more inclusive society overall in the longer term. While it’s a gradual process, anything we can do to reduce inequality, discrimination and marginalisation is worth pursuing.

4. Articulate your services and supports in the way that people who need them will understand.

Many social services organisations have unique terminologies or shorthand references for concepts. The key here is to ensure that any internal language remains exactly that: internal only.

Any information or descriptions of services should be written in plain language to ensure the material is as clear as possible.

A helpful technique to remember here is the ‘outside-in’ approach. Rather than approach content from the perspective of someone in your organisation (inside-out), adopt the perspective of someone encountering these topics and concepts for the very first time (outside-in).

Guide Dogs uses accessible terminology to articulate services in a way that supports people accessing them for the first time, and that does not require any clinical literacy to understand the benefit of what’s involved.

In addition to ‘Orientation & Mobility Services’, Guide Dogs includes qualifying content to accessibly describe the service: ‘practical skills to get you or your child where you’re going with confidence’.

Guide Dogs ensures its services are described in a way that makes sense to people discovering them for the first time.

Jesuit Social Services employs a similar technique. Many of the organisation’s programs and support services are accessed via referrers—and many are well known in certain areas of practice—so the ‘technical’ or organisational name of each service takes precedence. However, as some services can equally be accessed via self-referral, there’s also a qualifying statement to describe each program in a way that a person looking for support can understand. For example: ‘Connexions’ includes the secondary descriptor ‘support for young people with mental health and substance use issues.’

Jesuit Social Services articulates programs like Connexions (highlighted above) in a way that is easy to understand and recognise: both for referrers and people seeking support.

5. Use goal-based navigation or segment content by key audience groups.

Most people visiting your website will likely have a goal in mind. For people seeking services or support, that goal may be as simple as ‘get help’. With the right approach, you can make it easy for people to self-qualify for the most appropriate content or section on your site, regardless of how familiar they are with your services.

There are many ways to use navigation to connect people with the right service or content quickly.

Mental health organisations like Beyond Blue and Reach Out clearly direct people to the right area of the site based on their emotional context and what they hope to achieve.

Beyond Blue use a series of goal-oriented statements to guide people to the most appropriate information or support service.

Reach Out uses a similar approach, with a navigation and content architecture designed to support people in achieving their goals based on emotional context.

Rather than use labelling that simply identifies the feature or function—for example, ‘case studies’—Reach Out aligns with the emotional objective of someone who is likely to use or read that content: ‘hear from others like me’.

For some social services providers, geographies and catchment areas are important factors in how people access support. Australian Disability Services helps people find relevant information based on where they live or where a person is likely to receive disability support services.

Australian Disability Services helps people to find the right information based on where they live.

Some organisations have distinctive requirements for both people seeking services and clinical professionals looking to make referrals. This is another potentially useful way to segment information to ensure the right people find the right content and features quickly.

In providing a range of healthcare services, Mercy Health segments information to support the unique requirements of patients and visitors in contrast to healthcare professionals.

Mercy Health uses a segmented navigation to provide the right amount and type of information for both patients and clinicians.

This list is by no means exhaustive and there are many more things you can do to meet the differing needs of your varying audience groups. To find out more, check out this library of material we’ve built exclusively for social services marketing teams.

Or, if you’re keen to discuss your goals and some of the tactics that will achieve them, get in contact today. Let’s tee up a conversation and start better supporting the people who engage in your services.

Everyone will read this headline. Then what?

It’s highly likely you’ll read this subheading too.

This point though — right now — is where things get interesting. From here on in, I have to draw on my experience as a copywriter to keep your interest.

That’s the harsh reality of digital content. While everyone, more or less, does read the headline, only about 10% of you will actually read this article to the very bottom. Around 79% will skim it. At a rate of 4 seconds per 100 words.

I don’t blame you. Why would you read on?

The internet is a graveyard for grammar. Take a fleeting glance at the comments section of any YouTube video and you’ll witness cardinal sins of syntax, nightmarish misspellings and an apparent disdain for the written word in general.

Even when things are stylistically and grammatically correct, the web can be a portal to the pedestrian, especially where words are concerned. So much digital marketing and advertising content relies on archaic principles of print media – with no urgency, uniqueness, formatting, or appreciation for the medium.

In an industry where we often hear that ‘content is king’, it’s far more the case that content is lacking.

This needn’t be the situation. There are simple techniques to improve your digital writing. Here’s how to go from sloppy copy to killer content, and get your readers going beyond the headline.

Learn how people read online.

They don’t. As I mentioned, people are far more inclined to scan. So what do you do?

Grab a board before the audience gets bored – make like a S.U.R.F.A.

Punctuate your copy with imagery and gifs too. More on that later.

The S.U.R.F.A. principle suggests that copy is most effective when it is:

Succinct: Are you articulating concepts in the most efficient way possible? Don’t spend ten words saying what you could in three.
Understandable: Can the audience understand the material? Is it accessible? Does it use phrasing and terminology people understand? Too many businesses use internally-focussed jargon with no consideration of their audience.
Readable: Is the copy easy and enjoyable to read? Or, is it a monolithic slab of endless text?
Findable: Can users simply and quickly find what they’re looking for?
Actionable: Will people want to take action? And will they know exactly what to do in order to achieve their goals?

Remember, the web is a functional space. Readers want clarity of purpose and closure; more information; to download a pdf; to purchase a new toaster; to donate; to sign up for the newsletter.

Chances are, a lot of people went to a lot of effort to get someone reading your copy – toss the reader an easy alley-oop and help them achieve what they want.

Keep it simple.

It’s surprisingly easy to overcomplicate things. Follow the four (almost) ‘R’s to strip the fluff out of your writing.

Write.

As Ernest Hemingway so notably quoted: ‘Write drunk, edit sober’. Alternatively, make like Tupac Shakur and follow The Dotted Line Principle. Either way, the key is to loosen up and get your thoughts on the page – write with stream of consciousness if you have to. It doesn’t have to be pretty; just be productive.

Write ten headlines. Write multiple introductions. Draft the conclusion six times. Great copy is rarely a ‘one-and-done’ process. This helps refine thinking while you explore increasingly creative avenues. Push your thinking around on the page and have some fun with it.

Rest.

Let it settle. Give your writing time to sit and review things later with a fresh pair of eyes. The interim period will help you adopt a more critical editorial perspective.

Review.

Read what you’ve written. Aloud. It doesn’t have to be loud, but whisper each word and enunciate what you’ve written. If it feels awkward or uninteresting to read aloud, that’s exactly what it is.

Refine.

Make the changes and edits as you need to and don’t be afraid to repeat this process more than once. Good work is hard and hard work is good.

‘It takes a lot of effort to write effortlessly.’

Make your content the same way you’d make a sandwich.

Think of copy like carbs. Carbs are often the main aspect of a meal – they’re where the significant, satisfying value of a dish is found. Online, words are the same.

Consider words like the bread in a sandwich. They’re essential and they play a foundational role. But these days, few people will sit down and tuck into a bread/bread sandwich.

Years ago, bread was more than enough. Today, the contemporary palette is far more varied – we expect gruyere, pickles, mayonnaise, tomato, lettuce, prosciutto, chicken, relish, and all other sorts of delicious delicacies. We need more than the basics, no matter how considered they may be.

‘If your content is not a delicious club sandwich, your readers won’t be satisfied.’

Give people flavour. Offset your writing with other media to make your content more impactful. Consider photography, interviews and pull quotes, graphs to showcase data, audio files, gifs, embed video, make some aspects interactive, and do anything else you can imagine and implement.

Behold the hypnotic power of the sandwich.

Story showing is infinitely more engaging than storytelling. The more tangible and comprehensive a sense of the subject you create, the better.

Balance feel with function.

All good copy is dual-purposed.

‘Feel’ encompasses voice and tone; these are the aesthetic considerations that determine how audiences perceive your message.

Voice alludes to your point of view and personality – how you see the world. A good, strong voice can often be articulated like a character.

If ‘voice’ is your personality, then ‘tone’ is your mood at any given time. Tone is the spectrum of usable temperaments within a certain voice, applied in accordance with the context and content of the message. For example, if your established voice is inclined towards humour, then your tone could be sarcastic, whimsical or nonsensical. It depends on the wider identity of your brand, what you’re writing and who’ll be reading.

‘Function’ is comparatively much more straightforward and… functional. People who visit a website are often referred to as ‘users’. They are there to use something – written copy is there to help each visitor achieve a practical goal.

It could be something as simple as clearly articulating an outcome in an efficient or appealing way: ‘get our newsletter’ feels easier and more rewarding than ‘sign up’. Or, it could be more subtle: gradually influencing reader perceptions of an issue, experience, service or product over time.

Whatever the case, good copy will reiterate and enhance audience perception of a brand, and help users complete an objective in the most efficient and enjoyable way.

Appreciate the value of a headline.

‘Once you’ve written the headline, you’ve spent 80 cents of your dollar.’ – David Ogilvy.

Ogilvy was bang on the money on a few things, but he particularly nailed this quote on headlines: statistically speaking, eight out of ten people will read a headline, while a paltry two out of ten will continue on to read the body copy. Traffic can vary by as much as 500% based on a headline alone.

When your content can succeed or fail on the headline alone, it’s worth considering how you can optimize them.

Consider the four ‘U’s of headlines. Headlines are generally more impactful when they are:

Useful: what will I gain from reading this content? Everyone loves something for nothing. Offer a benefit. Solve a problem. Give the audience something interesting to take from the material.
Ultra-specific: what exact information am I going to glean from this piece? The easier things are on the internet, the better. Eliminate the guess work.
Unique: Is the headline interesting? Does it stand out? A handy tip for writing a unique headline – complete your piece, select the most opposed or idiosyncratic ideas contained within, and blend those concepts comfortably in the headline. As a quick example, this piece could be titled ‘Why you should write like a surfer with a sandwich’. Alternatively, try an interesting question or statement, alliteration, something unexpected, or get creative and pen a flip-line – they’re awesome for a number of reasons. Unfortunately though, there really is no blueprint on how to be unique. That’s the whole point; think outside the box.
Urgent: Will the reader be prompted to act or read immediately? WILL THEY??!!!!! In reality, urgency is less about being pushy or aggressive and more about making things as easy or interesting as possible. Avoid ‘friction words’: any verb that places onus on the user for activity. For example – ‘order’ vs ‘receive’. Alternatively, create urgency by making your headline compelling: ask an interesting question that will spur people on in hope of finding the answer. Don’t write clickbait though. If it smells like clickbait, it stinks.

Format for the win.

This is an easy fix. Appropriate formatting immediately lifts the impact of writing. Remember, people scan online; very few read. As a result, avoid the dreaded slab of text.

A non-descript slab of text is difficult to break down. It is intimidating and inaccessible. It is bland.

Break it up.

The ‘enter’ key is your friend.

Embrace short sentences and short paragraphs. Don’t try to combine too many ideas into either one. Ideally, keep paragraphs to between two and five sentences.

Try bolding sections of copy for important points. Italicising words also creates emphasis on certain aspects of your writing. Be careful not to overuse these techniques though – they can have the exact adverse effect and be overwhelming or distracting.

‘Quotes are also a great way to punctuate imposing slabs of text, and attribute importance to key or creative insights’ – Elliott Grigg.

Use the right tools to write the story.

Good content goes beyond copy; sometimes even the best writing is the wrong approach. Consider the story you’re trying to tell and the best platform or medium for that specific narrative. For example, take these two pieces and the approach of each.

Kobe Bryant’s shooting record.

Here’s every shot Kobe Bryant ever took in the NBA. Instantly, you get a comprehensive sense of the story at hand. The insight is immediate – even if no one scrolls beyond the headline in this case, the audience will take something away from having viewed the piece. Especially when you’re hooked by the interactive element of the visual display.

Hover your mouse over any point on the graph and you’ll view the details of the distance of the shot, when it was taken, and the opposition it was taken against. Including the headline and author credits, there are 83 words in this piece. It’s completely fine to take a minimalist approach when the material warrants it.

Vince Carter at the Sydney Olympics.

Same sport, different story. While Kobe’s shooting record is a narrative steeped in statistical analysis, Vince Carter’s famous dunk over 7-foot-2 France centre Frédéric Weis at the Sydney Olympics is a show-stopping phenomenon of raw athleticism.

This piece revisiting the event – In a Single Bound – tells the story and captures that fact in the headline panel, before you’ve read a single word beyond the headline. It then offers photography, videos, and Tweet-long analysis of the moment from a raft of basketball personalities: fantastic, comprehensive coverage for readers who choose to scroll down for additional detail.

Immediacy and engagement.

Both of these stories succeed because the reader comprehends the narrative immediately – your interest is piqued and before you know it, you’re halfway through the article. Both pieces use the ‘sandwich’ formula: employing copy as necessary in the best way to tell the story.

In a world where readers aren’t actually readers at all, scannability, immediacy and engagement are key. Achieve them however you can.

Final thoughts.

There you have it; easy techniques to boost your content. Some can be implemented straight away. Others may take time. Since you’re part of the 10% that are still reading, I’ll summarise..

Creating good content is relatively simple when you know the basic rules:

Remember how people read online – they don’t.
Write like Tupac or Ernest Hemingway – it’s easier than you think.
Make your content like a club sandwich – varied and consumable.
Consider feel and function – identify yours and inhabit both.

Good luck.

5 often-overlooked essentials that are crucial to create an impactful digital brand.

Beyond a logo, palette and fonts, an effective brand is the accumulative sum of many moving parts. Here are five that are easy to miss.

A brand refresh—or complete redesign—is a common trigger for a website redevelopment. In turn, the redevelopment project itself is another trigger: one that creates a huge range of opportunities to think about brand more extensively, to create a more meaningful connection with your audiences.

Brand is a fairly fluid proposition. There are many different definitions and perspectives on how brands should come to fruition.

Equally, there are many ways to approach branding work. As with any project, these are subject to constraints like timing, budget, resources, risk appetite, culture, and more.

Some refreshes are more extensive than others, for a wide range of reasons. In my experience though, the very first thing that happens is this:

In most brand redevelopments, you’ll get the fundamentals nailed down…

When a rebrand is completed, teams will typically define the perceived core elements of the brand. This usually includes:

A logo.
A colour palette of primary, secondary, and sometimes tertiary colours.
A family of fonts.

Depending on the nature of your organisation, it can take a lot of effort to get this far. So, if you’ve hit this point, congratulations! Determining these baseline elements is reason to pause and celebrate momentarily. Don’t rest on your laurels for too long though.

You’ve made good progress…

…but you’ll need a little more.

Or really, quite a lot more. An effective brand is the accumulative sum of many, many moving parts.

There are many elements required to bring your brand to life in a website interface, digital product, app, or beyond. This includes both conceptual elements like brand positioning and personality, and practical elements, like imagery style, functional animations, and brand graphics.

Let’s unpack some of the elements that are often overlooked, why they’re important, and how they serve your brand.

1. Brand positioning and differentiation.

Positioning should centre your customers on your brand’s unique strengths, so that they can quickly understand what you do and why it is valuable to them.

A good brand position means you will occupy a distinctive place in the mind of your target market. It should answer the question: ‘why should a customer choose us?’ Or, in an ideal world, makes that question entirely redundant. To quote Peter Drucker:

“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits [them] and sells itself.”

There are many, many high-quality resources and accomplished people who frequently speak and write about positioning. One of my favourites at the moment is April Dunford, a positioning consultant, speaker and author who specialises with B2B technology companies. In this excellent resource, April starts with: ‘every company I have ever worked with has struggled to make their awesomeness obvious’.

That’s a nice summation of the role of positioning, and also the perfect rationale as to why it’s a priority. If you don’t establish a clear definition of why you’re awesome, what do your customers have to connect with?

2. Brand personality and values.

This is about ascribing character traits to your brand. An effective brand creates a feeling—a connection with people—in the same way that a person does.

So, it begs the question: how would you describe your brand if it were a person?

The best way to approach this question is with the last five words in mind: if it were a person. In my experience, it’s easy to run to vague descriptors that don’t actually articulate a personality. Examples to avoid include things like:

Industry-leading.
Dedicated to high quality service.
Value-generating.

The issue with these examples is they do not meet the utility of how the traits are used; they speak to value propositions rather than personality traits. When done effectively, brand personality traits are hugely useful in informing visual concepts, content tone-of-voice, and more.

For example, a disability services provider might define their brand personality traits as:

Approachable: authentic, accessible and available for everyone.
Creative: nimble, inventive, and optimistic.
Adventurous: confident, refreshing, and energetic.

With these in place, you can start to develop visual treatments and graphical treatments that reiterate each personality trait. This approach ensures every molecule of your design is linked to the core qualities that define the brand; everything ‘feels’ like an appropriate and cohesive expression of your brand’s personality.

As a hypothetical example, designers might look to express the ‘adventurous’ brand trait by:

Using large, full-bleed images of proud, confident people.
Avoiding image masks that create visual interruptions or hide figures away.
Embracing white space to convey a sense of freshness and potential.
Using graphic shapes in bold ways to convey a sense of direction, excitement and purpose (see point 5, below).

3. Imagery style and art direction.

Your imagery and photographic style should encapsulate your brand’s personality. It should not be driven by the personal likes and dislikes of key members of the team.

Before a website redevelopment, it’s helpful to draft an overall rationale for imagery, including the stylistic conventions that are applicable for the approach and a conceptual justification for why each convention is important in the context of the brand. This step is relevant regardless of whether you use stock imagery or commissioned photoshoots and, ideally, should also include references to video content.

It’s about providing clear guardrails that outline an overarching approach. And crucially, that link back to and reiterate your brand personality or values.

For example, Animals Australia is all about emphasising the dignity and respect of all living beings, especially animals. As a result, some of the guidelines they might use in imagery and art direction include:

Always portray animals with honesty: always be transparent and portray animals in their true environments. Use a soft depth of field with sharp focus on the animal.
Avoid high saturation or bokeh effects: images of animals should feel natural and realistic, rather than overly curated or contrived.
Be sure to highlight respect: strive to showcase images that capture respectful interactions between humans and animals. All interactions should feel natural and consenting from the animals perspective.

Of course, you might have different treatments for different applications or types of content. Sometimes Animals Australia requires an imagery style that is bright, optimistic and hopeful. Other times, there’s a need for more somber, investigative work, like you see in this type of content. (Please note, some people may find imagery distressing upon clicking the link).

As with much of the way your brand is defined, these guidelines need to be somewhat fluid in reflection of the fact that new applications will evolve and change over time.

4. Functional system animations.

Functional animations are distinct from conceptual animations (see point 5, below), in that they communicate information about the behaviour or action of the website. Examples of functional animations include:

Call-to-action buttons, which invite people to complete goals like ‘read more’, ‘contact us’, or ‘donate’.
Page transitions, which can provide a branded experience while conveying that you are moving between content pages or website sections.
Loading animations, to highlight that the system is processing a request.
Link animations, to highlight that something is a clickable element.
Menu animations, used in navigation.

With the right approach, you can turn a sub-optimal aspect of a website (like waiting for a new content page to load) into something delightful that communicates and celebrates your brand.

Again, the styles you choose should align with and reiterate the core brand personality traits.

Let’s consider a loading animation. Depending on your brand personality, would your loading animation be sleek, luxurious and refined, like this example from Foresters Financial?

Or bouncy, vibrant and whimsical, like this example from creative web developer Patrick Heng?

5. Conceptual animations and brand graphics.

Brand graphics are an excellent way to add visual intrigue throughout your interface, while conceptually reinforcing the core principles of your organisation.

In short, they help people feel a certain way about your organisation, service or product, without you having to explicitly instruct them to.

As a vision services provider focused on supporting people to live independently move with confidence, Guide Dogs uses big, bold shapes to convey a sense of exploration and movement.

With a relatively simple animated graphic device, you get a clear sense that Guide Dogs is all about moving forward, exploring the world, and supporting people to make progress towards their goals.

For another example, consider an organisation like Fostering Connections, a joint initiative of foster care agencies supported by the State Government across metropolitan and regional Victoria.

While the animations in this site don’t offer any functional utility, they serve three important roles:

They create a sense of visual delight and intrigue, incentivising people to continue reading and engage further with the content.
They offer a sense of youthful warmth, playfulness and whimsy, in keeping with the nature of the site’s subject matter.
With shapes overlapping, attaching, and reaching out to one another, they reiterate the sense of connection, inclusivity and support that is key to the Fostering Connections brand.

With these elements in place, you’re far better placed to convey your brand meaningfully in digital applications.

That said, this list is by no means exhaustive. There’s still much more to consider, with things like:

Written tone-of-voice.
Social media.
Print and physical collateral.
Outbound marketing collateral (like eDMs and campaign assets).
And potentially more depending on your organisation.

This isn’t intended to act as an ominous to-do list, but rather to help you see the opportunities at play. Every single brand touch point is an opportunity to do something impactful, connect with customers in a meaningful way, drive action, and deliver value.

If you’d like to talk more about anything covered in this piece, or you’re on the cusp of your own brand rollout, I’d love to help. Get in touch using our contact form to tee up a conversation. Or give us a call for a chat about what you hope to achieve: 9445 0326.

How to align multiple contributors and stakeholders while producing content at scale.

When many passionate writers and marketers are telling a breadth of stories, things can get noisy. Here’s how to keep everyone in harmony.

If you oversee multiple marketing teams at a large-scale health or social services provider, you’re lucky—even though, admittedly, the past few pandemic-defined years have likely been a challenge.

Your work is incredibly meaningful. The people are passionate. And, from a content perspective, there are many, many incredible stories to tell.

While these are significant benefits, they can also manifest as challenges. When you have many passionate writers and marketers working to articulate a breadth of stories and ideas, things can get a little noisy.

Perhaps you have different state-based teams producing website content under a single national banner. Perhaps you have one large team working on many different campaigns concurrently. Perhaps you have multiple programs or service lines, each with distinctive requirements for their own marketing activity. Perhaps you rely on timely approvals from multiple stakeholders, each with different levels of literacy and experience of digital products.

As part of a unification project to support their shift to a federated model, Guide Dogs brought five different marketing teams together and faced a number of these scenarios.

Consolidating five unique websites into a cohesive content experience under the one banner is not without its challenges, especially when:

Each site had distinctive terminology and conventions for articulating different concepts.
Each site had a different structure and information architecture (or, different logic for how pieces of content should fit together).
Each site is supported by an in-house team of marketers and content-producers.

Here’s how to get everyone working in harmony while producing content at scale.

Get everyone singing from the same song (or style) sheet.

Give your teams clear, practical guidelines for how written content can and should come to fruition. Perhaps you already have a detailed style guide, perhaps you don’t.

If one doesn’t exist, you don’t need to create anything exhaustive. Just some simple overarching context, some examples of how to articulate certain topics, how not to articulate others, and preferred words or phrases.

For example, you might prefer the word ‘people’ rather than ‘patients’ or ‘clients’ when referring to those who engage with your services.

This convention mitigates a scenario where you have to provide the same feedback or implement the same edits continuously. When you’re talking about a website with 2,000 different content pages, these minor time savings can be significant.

The goal is to create as much alignment as possible for many contributors, rather than enforce absolute rigidity.

Make it clear how people contribute.

In my experience, working with many content contributors at once is like building a plumbing or pipeline system.

The more clarity and constraint you provide, the better and more efficiently things will flow towards your objective. Without structure and clarity, there will be leakage and deviation from your goal.

Working with many content teams at once is like building a plumbing system: without structure and clarity, there will be leakage and deviation from your goal.

Using a preparatory CMS platform is a great way to provide this clarity and structure. That includes things like:

Who is tasked with writing each content piece.
How many words it needs to be.
The functional purpose of the content (and even different sections of content within the one webpage).
How it is approved.
When to trigger certain review or approvals processes.

Pre-CMS platforms can provide visibility of roles, responsibilities, and expectations.

Using a platform like GatherContent, Narrato, or Adobe Experience Manager you can provide granular clarity for all of the above.

Again, at scale, and with hundreds of contributors or reviewers, with different levels familiarity with the project, this can be invaluable.

Be transparent and track progress.

Returning to the plumbing and pipeline analogy, it’s important to check for blockages along the way. This helps to identify any sticking points for your teams of contributors.

This is an example of a content workflow with approvals gates.

We can see in the above hypothetical workflow that most content items have ‘no content’. You might infer from this information that people have trouble starting and getting their initial thoughts on the page. For whatever reason, they’re unable to move to the ‘framework ready for review’ stage of the production and approvals process.

With this insight, you could do any number of things to encourage progress:

Facilitate a workshop to provide more insight on how to create a framework.
Create and distribute an example of a framework for others to use as a reference.
Celebrate the efforts of those who’ve created a framework, and more.

On the flip side, without visibility of this workflow, you can’t identify the team’s challenges or provide supports to facilitate a smooth content production process.

Check in frequently.

The key here is a little, often. Do everything you can to avoid an ‘a-ha’ moment. For example, if there’s a leak in your production pipeline, identifying it quickly will save you trouble.

The longer a pipe leaks, the muddier things get. These leaks can manifest as:

People writing the wrong type of content, like editorial blog articles instead of branding content to influence positioning.
Misapplied tone of voice.
Using inappropriate terms consistently, at scale.
People not knowing what to do and procrastinating.

Be proactive, consistent and visible with your check-ins. Put them in writing, ideally in a central location where many stakeholders can see and access them. For example, in the above example with ‘framework ready for review’, highlight your observation about the perceived difficulty a framework created.

Get feedback from the team. Sharing the challenge and making it visible is the best way to own and manage it.

So there you have it…

It sounds so simple. But with many of these techniques—as with content production at scale in general—the devil is in the detail.

With the right approach, you’ll find content production incredibly rewarding. Even addictive, as you watch your content deliver increasing amounts of genuine value for your audiences.

The other side of the equation? Well, no one enjoys writer’s block. Much less so when there are multiple teams and stakeholders mired in the experience alongside you.

On the plus side, if you find yourself in this scenario, you can always remedy the situation. It takes diligence and multiple techniques in the right combination for your requirements.

Good luck!

How to extract the right information from key stakeholders.

Online surveys, one-on-one interviews and workshops compared — how to choose the right method to gather the information your digital project needs.

You’re embarking on a large website redevelopment project. You will realise the need for effective content curation. You also understand that involvement, and buy-in, from all stakeholders and users is critical to the success of the project. Through information gathering at the start, both of these objectives can be managed through the same process. But how do you ensure the process is effective?

First of all, congratulations. You are one of the few people who have realised that successful digital projects understand the needs of all stakeholders. This includes both internal stakeholders—executives, board members—and external stakeholders like end users, media, and connected organisations.

The next hurdle is extracting the information you need in a way that gives you confidence to push your project to the next stage. There are several methods to consider. The one you choose can dictate the success of the project—and the quality of the information you collect. This piece will look at three common data collection methods to help you assess the right process for your project:

Online surveys
One-on-one interviews and
Workshops.

If you’re running long-form workshops or interview sessions, a flash of green can help keep things fresh.

1. Online surveys.

If you need to extract specific information from a large number of people, but don’t have the ability or the resources (read: time and money) to contact each respondent individually, online surveys are a good option.

The questionnaire you use to gather information via the survey could be quantitative, qualitative, or both.

Quantitative surveys involve ‘closed’ questions that allow people to respond from a fixed set of answers. Think ‘yes/no’, dropdown boxes, or Likert scales.

Qualitative surveys feature ‘open’ questions, involving free-typed text boxes asking for a respondent’s opinion.

So should you use a survey? Let’s look at some advantages and disadvantages:

Advantages of online surveys

They are great for extracting information at scale. If you need to get information from dozens, hundreds or even thousands of people, you might struggle to do this through interviews or workshops. Online surveys are great for situations where you need to hear from lots of people, giving you a much better chance of getting a representative sample of your target population.
They are less time consuming for both respondents and researchers. Interviews and workshops can be incredibly time-consuming. Online surveys—on the other hand—are cheap and easy to set up, and easy to fill in.
They can be completed at the respondent’s leisure. Interviews and workshops will always mean trying to coordinate times between researchers and participants. With online surveys, respondents can complete the online survey at any time they like. This is particularly useful in situations where a respondent will need to go away and get information from someone or somewhere else, which may not be possible in an interview or a workshop.
They facilitate comparability, analysis and visualisation. Especially in the case of quantitative surveys, when everyone answers exactly the same questions and this is done at scale, you can compare everyone’s answers, perform statistical analysis on the data and then chart the results.
Answers are less influenced by the researcher. While online surveys still have the potential for researcher bias (based on how questions are worded), the impact of this is much lower than interviews and workshops, where leading questions can often creep in. Anonymity leads to candid responses. Online surveys, if kept anonymous, can lead to respondents feeling safer to be more honest with their answers.

Disadvantages of online surveys

People may provide incorrect or incomplete information. The researcher has no way of knowing whether people’s answers to the survey are true and correct, as the respondent may have just filled in the bare minimum of information just to say they’ve completed the survey.
Respondents may not understand a question. If they don’t understand it, they aren’t able to answer it.
Answers cannot be probed. Unlike interviews and workshops, there is an element of rigidity in online surveys. You may want to learn more about a respondent’s answer, but unfortunately this is not possible.
Small sample size. As mentioned above, one of the main benefits of online surveys is scale. However, one of the hardest parts of online surveys is getting enough people to contribute, meaning you may not have enough respondents to make it meaningful. It’s hard to convey feelings or emotions. In interviews and workshops, the researcher can read a participant’s non-verbal cues and body language. This is not possible with online surveys.
Lack of accessibility. Online surveys are often designed in a way that makes them harder to fill in for people with visual or cognitive disabilities.

When to consider an online survey for your digital project

Basically, it’s any time you want simple information at scale.

For example, you want to learn from multiple users about the functionality on your current site and what people would like to see on a new site. Polling a large number of users for this information would be best done using an online survey.

Tips on running a successful online survey

Think about the structure of questions. I sometimes think about the form you fill in when you sign up at a new doctor’s clinic. The question ‘Do you smoke?’ almost always has a ‘yes/no’ response. Which is reductive, because what if I say ‘no’, but I previously smoked for 20 years and I only quit last month? The doctor probably needs to know that information. Think about this when structuring your questions.
Keep questions specific and understandable. The simpler the better.
Consider using visuals. If you’re asking for feedback on a certain part of your website, consider adding a screenshot to support the question. This makes it easier for people to understand, and means they don’t have to navigate to your site to find the thing you’re asking them about.
Consider coupling together closed and open questions. For example, ‘Do you feel the current site is easy to navigate? Yes/No’ - is a closed question. Follow up with an open question: ‘Why did you select this response?’ The combination of the two questions helps you to get quantitative data along with the meaning behind the data: the best of both worlds.

2. One-on-one interviews.

One-on-one interviews can be conducted in a few different ways. Our preference is face-to-face: the researcher sitting in the same room as the interviewee. If that’s not possible, consider video conference interviews or, our least favourite (but sometimes necessary), phone interviews.

Snacks can help interview participants feel more comfortable throughout their contribution.

Let’s look at some advantages and disadvantages of one-on-one interviews.

Advantages of one-on-one interviews

Answers can be probed. Like surveys, one-on-one interviews usually start with a questionnaire of some sort. With interviews, however, the list of questions is best considered as a ‘seed’ list. You aren’t just looking to play question-answer tennis with the interviewee. Instead, look to expand on each answer with a follow-up question. This is almost impossible to do with surveys, but easy with interviews.
You can capture non-verbal cues and emotions. When someone answers a question, you can use their body language and emotions to assess the intensity of their answer.
Focused time with no distractions. An interview involves time blocked out specifically for the task of getting information. The interviewee can’t be distracted by social media, a crying baby or a knock at the door.
Low time commitment for participants. While it is very time-consuming for researchers, interviews are usually a fairly low time commitment for participants... not quite as quick as online surveys, but usually much less than workshops.
They are good for sensitive or confidential data. Some people may be unwilling to give away information via an online survey (through fear of that electronic data being insecure) or in a workshop (because they don’t want other workshop participants to have access to that sensitive data). One-on-one interviews tend to be a better setting for this type of information.

Disadvantages of one-on-one interviews

They are costly. Given that there is an almost direct linear relationship between the number of participants and the cost of the research, interviews are almost always the most expensive form of research, especially as the number of interviews grows.
They are time consuming. Each interview needs to be done separately, so from a researcher’s point of view, they can be incredibly time-consuming.
You often have a limited sample size. Because of the two points mentioned above, it’s sometimes difficult to source participants. This means there is a lower chance the results of the research are truly representative of a wider cohort.
The quality of the responses is dependent on the skill of the interviewer. Because interviews are more about probing (rather than just asking a set list of questions), the interviewer has to be highly proficient in this skill. And it is a skill: something that can be learned over time, but not something that everyone possesses innately. Inexperienced researchers may struggle to think of follow-up questions on the spot, and may fall into the trap of asking closed questions that cause conversations to ‘dry up’, or leading questions that negatively affect the quality of responses.
They aren’t good for collecting quantitative data. If you want to measure something, online surveys are a much better option.

When to consider one-on-one interviews for your digital project

One-on-one interviews are good for situations when you need deep insight into a topic, but that topic needs to be treated with sensitivity.

For example, you want to hear from every department in your company about the troubles they face with a current website. You won’t get deep insight from an online survey, but people may not be willing to truly open up with their feelings in a workshop situation. One-on-one interviews will glean the insights you need.

Tips on running successful one-on-one interviews

Allow people time to prepare. Never let someone go into an interview without any knowledge of what the interview is about. You don’t need to send them the specific list of questions, but you should give participants a heads up on what topics you’d like to discuss in the interview so they have time to think about those topics and bring more detailed answers to the interview.
Ensure complete confidentiality. Reassure participants that whatever they tell you will be treated with complete confidentiality. Doing this will put people at ease to open up and elicit more candid responses.
Ensure questions are mostly open-ended, and always non-leading. Your job as a researcher is to get people to open up about their opinions on a topic, so avoid closed questions with limited responses. But be wary of leading questions - ones where the answer is contained in the question, or where you subconsciously direct an interviewee to respond in a certain way.
Have some good prompts up your sleeve. Like, ‘tell me more’, ‘what happened next?’, ‘how do you feel about that?’ Be careful though. Questions worded incorrectly, like ‘why did you do it that way?’, can sometimes make a participant defensive.
Silence is your friend. When someone answers a question, don’t feel the need to jump straight to the next question. Instead, pause for a few seconds. Silence is uncomfortable, so the participant will often want to fill that silence with more information.
Don’t lose focus, and keep an eye on the time. While one-on-one interviews are great for digging deeper into a topic, conversations can often go off on tangents and time can get away from you. Be respectful of people’s time. If you feel like you’ve spent too long on a topic, say so and move on. When you’ve reached your allotted time, give the participant the option to finish up on time. Only keep going if they are happy to do so.
Consider getting out of the office. Sitting face-to-face across a desk can be intimidating for some people. Sitting side-by-side on a park bench on a sunny day could be a much better setting. Remember though, if you need to take notes, make sure it’s easy to do this. And if you need to record the conversation’s audio (with the participant’s permission, of course), make sure you don’t go somewhere too noisy.

3. Workshops.

Workshops often involve a group of people in the same room, working together to achieve some predetermined goal. Unlike online surveys and one-on-one interviews, workshops are often not solely an information gathering exercise. Participants are often also involved in helping develop a solution.

One or two team members should facilitate the conversation between contributing stakeholders.

In a workshop, your job is less of an ‘interviewer’ and more of a ‘facilitator’. Like one-one-one interviews, you may still have some ‘seed’ questions, but those seed questions are likely to be less specific and used solely to help you facilitate; to keep conversations moving, rather than looking for specific answers.

In workshops, you may also be joined by your coworkers. Here, you act as a group of researchers working together towards the same common goal. Workshops almost always involve some sort of tactile activity to help participants ‘see’ the information they are providing, such as answers written on a whiteboard or butcher’s paper, or post-it notes or index cards stuck to the wall.

Keep a visual record as stakeholders make progress throughout the workshop.

Let’s look at some advantages and disadvantages of the workshop format.

Advantages of workshops

They encourage creativity. Workshops are useful when you need participants to ‘feed off each other’. When one workshop participant says something, it triggers an idea in someone else’s mind, who then adds their contribution to the conversation.
You can have different levels of knowledge and experience in the same room. Further to the above point, participants can learn from one another. This is not possible with online surveys and one-on-one interviews.
You can sometimes resolve issues there and then. With multiple people in the room, it is sometimes possible to solve a problem immediately, as opposed to the researcher going away, reporting on the findings and then acting on the data (which can sometimes take weeks).
Ownership of results. Because workshop participants are usually there to develop a solution of some sort, there is often a greater sense of ‘buy-in’ for the outcome of the project.
Helps ensure a shared understanding. When everyone is in the same room, everyone gets access to the same information. And while you can never guarantee that everyone understands everything in the same way, workshops are useful in achieving a shared understanding of a topic.

Disadvantages of workshops

Dominant characters can take over. We’ve all been in meetings where one person does 80% of the talking. This is a real risk with workshops, where one person decides to take the superior role, jumping to answer each question first and shooting down other people’s answers. It’s critical these dominant characters are managed.
A risk of ‘groupthink’. Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon that occurs when a group’s desire for harmony causes them to make poor decisions, with individuals avoiding controversial issues or agreeing with more dominant characters because they fear how their colleagues may perceive them. Groupthink leads to everyone just agreeing with everyone else (because it feels good to come to an agreement on something), rather than hunting for the right solution by tackling challenging topics.
They involve a large time commitment from participants. The largest of our three information gathering methods, workshops can often involve participants in a room together for several hours. Some can even span several days. Workshops can be exhausting, both mentally and physically.

When you might consider a workshop for your digital project

Workshops are great when you are looking for the collective knowledge of a group of people, rather than just individual opinions. In successful workshops, the value of the group is greater than the sum of its individual parts. Workshops are great for situations when you need everyone to collectively ‘build’ something. This could include:

a common understanding of the project.
a solution to a complex problem or aspect of your project.
a detailed roadmap of website features, functionality and deliverables.
a timeline of activity.

Tips on running successful workshops

Allow people time to prepare. Just like interviews, people will contribute better if they have some time to think about the topic. Don’t just send a meeting request and expect people to be at their best if they don’t know what is going to be discussed.
No tech. Apart from any tech necessary to the workshop (projector, TV screen etc.), consider banning all technology from the session. Workshops can be long and it is difficult to stay focused. So, eliminate anything that can become an unnecessary distraction. Mobile phones turned off. Laptops closed.
Consider ‘controlled reveal’. This a technique that sees participants write down their answers to a question in private, and then each person ‘reveals’ their answer. This simple technique is great for preventing one or two people from dominating a conversation and for avoiding groupthink.
Take turns. Again, a technique for avoiding dominance. Get everyone to take turns speaking on a topic.
Ask open-ended questions. Just like interviews, workshops are about getting people’s opinions; you’ll struggle to get people to open up with closed questions.
Make it visual. Since workshops are often about a group of people building something together, the group needs to be able to see what they are building. Write stuff on post-its, draw stuff on whiteboards, stick stuff to the wall. Don’t just ‘talk’ about a topic. That’s not a workshop, it’s just a meeting.
Get participants to contribute more than just words. They should be involved in any physical aspects of the workshop: the writing, drawing, or sticking I mentioned above. You shouldn’t be the only person doing this. Get the participants involved too.
Capture the outcome. All those things you stuck to the wall should be photographed and sent to the workshop participants. This will help with recall, and give participants an even greater sense of ownership.

***

So, which form of research is best? Well, it turns out that they all have their own uses, and a combination of the three is probably best. If you’re running a digital project, consider using online surveys, one-on-one interviews and workshops together. They all have their benefits, and any disadvantages presented with one form of research can be overcome by another.

Publish once and populate in many areas: adopting the ‘no wrong door’ approach to content architecture.

When a single piece of content has multiple logical homes, the ‘no wrong door’ approach lets you publish once and surface it everywhere it’s needed.

Content architecture—and let’s be honest, content in general—is often a source of anxiety for marketing teams when it comes to website projects.

Questions often abound. Questions like:

What if there are conflicting views about where content should live on the site?
What if we can’t come to agreement on the structure of the site?
What if there are multiple areas where one piece of content might live?

These are all valid questions. And all scenarios that pop up when a team is considering website content architecture.

Then there’s the scenario where your users, visitors or supporters will expect the content to live in multiple areas throughout the site. In these cases, the winning rule of thumb is this:

If it makes sense to your most committed supporters and advocates, make it work on your website.

Animals Australia faced this very scenario when building their website.

After a user research program and interviews with a variety of supporters, it became clear there were two key goals for visitors in relation to content:

1. Get a sense of timely issues that require attention or support (i.e. view the latest news).

2. Get a sense of all the issues and updates pertaining to a specific category of interest (for example, everything someone should be aware of in relation to greyhound racing, or live export).

These two destinations are obviously not mutually exclusive. If there is an unfolding issue in the news about live export, a supporter would reasonably expect to find any relevant updates in both sections of the site. There’s no point having an ‘everything live export’ section that doesn’t include the latest news. And vice versa.

So, what happens when one content piece has multiple, logical homes?

Adopt the ‘no wrong door’ approach to information architecture. This is based on the idea that there needn’t be a single pathway to any piece of content.

In some scenarios, people need multiple ways to access the same one piece of material. It’s common in publishing and editorial websites like The Age, ABC News, or The Guardian.

On a site like The Guardian, you will find multiple pathways to the same piece of content.

It’s also common in cases where a product or service might appear across multiple categories. Guide Dogs have a goal-based website architecture where services are categorised based on the objective they support people to achieve.

The Orthoptics service is relevant to people hoping to both Live Better At Home and Get Support Through A Change In Vision.

Here, you can see the Orthoptics service is discoverable via multiple pathways on the Guide Dogs site.

The ‘no wrong door’ approach is achieved by publishing a piece of content once—a single representation in the back-end of the website—and having it surface in many areas on the public facing front-end.

While it’s a great technique to have in your toolkit, there are still questions:

What are the possibilities when implementing this type of approach?
What are some of the ‘gotchas’ to look out for?
How do we protect against things getting messy and avoid multiple duplicate content pieces throughout our site?
What are the implications for teams publishing content on the website?

Let’s take a look at some of the answers.

How do we ensure it is easy for our team to manage and maintain?

Animals Australia built their publishing system with a focus on simple and efficient content management. From a technical perspective, the team use WordPress custom routes to surface content in multiple locations, with ‘custom taxonomies’ so content producers can flag multiple areas for content to appear throughout the site at the touch of a button.

This approach ensures site administrators manage each piece of content in one central place, without having to republish the same article in multiple locations throughout the content management system.

A simple set of controls allows content publishers to emphasise one content piece throughout many different areas of Animals Australia’s site architecture.

A set of controls allows you to select from common areas an article may need to feature throughout the site. For example, you could choose to place greater emphasis on a content piece by highlighting it:

As a prominent piece of content of the homepage ‘latest news’ grid.
As a featured content piece against a specific category, like factory farming.

Controls in the publishing system allow you to choose which pieces are emphasised in different areas of the site.

How do we ensure our content architecture doesn’t get messy?

Control and flexibility are important, but too much flexibility can compromise structure. It’s crucial to provide some constraint around where content can, and cannot, be published.

Animals Australia have some flexibility, as outlined above, because they also have clear rules built into the logic of the system about where certain types of content can appear within the information architecture.

These rules are informed by the desires and goals expressed by supporters in the research interviews.

Anything tagged as a ‘news item’ automatically publishes to the latest news feed. This ensures this section is always up to date with the latest news content and removes reliance on manual effort from the team. Side note: ‘news’ is distinct here from campaigns or petitions, which have their own area in the site.

At the same time, each news item requires a mandatory ‘issue tag’ in order to be published. Live export and factory farming are examples of issue tags. This ensures the same news item is listed against a relevant issue that supporters visiting the site may hope to learn about.

In addition to news articles, each issue page—like live export and factory farming—automatically pulls in other types of content from the site, including petitions, campaigns and pledges that are relevant to the cause. It’s designed to provide a comprehensive overview: ‘show me everything I should know about live export and all the ways I can support your advocacy in this space.’

By automating structure, Animals Australia remove the burden of manual updates and ensures there are clear, definitive conventions for which types of content appear in different places.

These conventions, again informed by the views and goals of supporters, ensure people coming to the site will be able to find and achieve what they want, quickly.

Think Global Health—an online resource that examines the ways in which changes in health reshape economies, societies, and the everyday lives of people around the globe—uses a similar convention.

In the above screenshot, Think Global Health’s ‘The Latest’ feed (on the far right) is an automatically updating snapshot of the most recently published articles, which reflect the themes you can see along the site’s main navigation, underneath the logo: environment, poverty, trade, governance.

With this approach, you could access the same piece of content by viewing all of the latest content, or by going to the ‘trade’ section of the site, below, which pulls in all content orbiting around that specific topic.

This ensures people have rapid access to specific timely content pieces, or a deep-dive of every content piece relating to an overarching theme.

Don’t search engines penalise sites that feature duplicated content? How can we be sure we won’t lose the value of our search ranking?

Yes, search engines like Google have been known to penalise sites for duplicating content. The intention for this penalty is to protect and prioritise sites that produce original material, rather than those that simply duplicate or syndicate from other sources.

What happens, though, when you’re the one repurposing owned material within your own site?

This is where to use a technique called canonical URLs to avoid any SEO penalty.

The canonical URL involves a snippet of code that defines a single origin for any pages that are surfaced in multiple locations throughout the site.

Think of it as a signal to search engine algorithms that says: ‘we know there are many pages with the same content because we’ve done this intentionally. This page here is the ‘master version’ that you should rank in search engine results pages; you can ignore all of the others.’

With canonical URLs in place, you won’t be penalised by search engines for duplicating content within your website.

If everything is so variable and flexible, how do people find their way from one piece of content to the next?

Animals Australia use a range of techniques to help people orient themselves within the context of the wider site and to promote the continued discovery of relevant content. Some of these include:

Dynamic breadcrumbs: this secondary navigation scheme provides information to help people understand what content they’re viewing in relation to other, related pages. It also provides a series of quick links to guide people back to previous key pages they may have accessed while navigating through the website.

The breadcrumbs in this article point people towards important pages related to this content, being ‘Our Work’ and ‘Live export’.

A category-specific sidebar navigation: appearing on the side of any editorial article, this navigational feature allows Animals Australia to point people to other key pieces of content that relate to an overarching issue. For example, every content piece that is tagged as being relevant to ‘Live export’ will display links to things you can read—or do—to support Animals Australia’s position on live export.

This sidebar navigation provides a handy tool for people to support Animals Australia’s work in relation to different issues.

Related content at the bottom of each article: which is either automatically updated (pulling in the three most recently published pieces of content that relate to an issue) or manually managed to highlight key content pieces.

Every article invites readers to discover more content relating to a particular issue or theme.

All of these techniques provide opportunities for people to discover more content and make it easy to move throughout the site.

If you’re grappling with sophisticated content requirements, ‘no wrong door’ could be the right approach.

With the right navigation implementation, you can support people to discover and consume content in the way that most make sense to them.

Alternatively, if you try to force people down singular pathways to key information, you’re only denying your supporters—and ultimately yourself—of value.

7 design tips to get you started with web accessibility.

Designing for accessibility isn’t as hard as you might think. Here’s where to start, and why it makes the web better for everyone.

Web accessibility makes it easier for people to use the web. It creates a better user experience for a wider audience. And it’s not just targeted towards people with disabilities.

Imagine you, the designer, are at your next project kick-off. The project manager and client start discussing accessibility, government requirements and WCAG 2.0 AA. Are you puzzled, overwhelmed and bewildered? Or do you know what you have to do, but are wondering how to tackle the design?

You may have read the guidelines, or perhaps attended a WCAG seminar. But if you’ve never applied those learnings to your designs, where do you start?

Have no fear. We have seven easy tips you can use when designing your next website. But first, let’s look at why web accessibility is important, and at a tool to help guide you, not restrain you.

Why is web accessibility important?

Web accessibility does not just apply to people with disabilities; it’s for people of all abilities. Focusing on accessibility makes it easier for everyone to use the web, in a way that is consistent and accessible, regardless of their technical background.

The world is slowly becoming paperless. Common day-to-day tasks, such as banking, applying for passports and sending parcels, have all moved online. Accessibility is becoming more and more important for every business that services customers.

A website that is well-considered from an accessibility perspective creates a better experience for a wider user base. That’s because the design, navigation and content of these sites is inherently easier to use.

An article by Anne Gibson at A List Apart offers a refreshing outlook. As Anne says:

‘Web accessibility means that people can use the web. Not “people with disabilities”. Not “blind people and deaf people”. Not “people who have cognitive disabilities” or “men who are colour blind”. People who are using the web. People who are using what you’re building.’ – Anne Gibson.

Gian Wild, director of AccessibilityOz, agrees:

‘When it comes to making web sites accessible to people with disabilities, there are a huge range of issues that a designer, developer or content author needs to think about.’ – Gian Wild.

It is not just making a website accessible to a screen reader; it is much more complicated than that. Sometimes the needs of one group (for example, dyslexics who prefer low colour contrast) directly contradict the needs of another (people with mild visual impairments who prefer high colour contrast). WCAG is about meeting the needs of all these groups.

The tool to help you get there: WCAG.

‘WCAG’ stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. The guidelines were published by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). They help designers and developers create accessible content for web users.

WCAG is separated into three conformance levels:

Level A: some impact on design
Level AA: medium impact on design
Level AAA: high to extreme impact on design

Set success criteria are listed under each level. They are the requirements that should be met for your website to be accessible, and guidance techniques are outlined for each criterion. These are reliable ways to meet the success criteria, and include colour contrast, font size and layout.

Government and many large organisations target at least WCAG 2.0 Level AA, which covers a broad range of recommendations to improve accessibility. If a website solely follows Level A, it is almost certain that disabled users will struggle to use it. You know you can do better than that.

Many organisations don’t reach Level AA across every aspect. WCAG exists to guide you in making the right decisions about accessibility for your design. It is your responsibility, when designing an accessible site, to do everything you can to ensure the design does not limit users in any way.

Seven quick web accessibility tips to design for WCAG.

To save you wading through the accessibility guidelines, here are some useful tips to consider on your next WCAG-friendly design.

1. Use consistent hyperlink and button styles.

The intent here is to ensure consistent identification of functional components that appear repeatedly across a set of web pages.

Consistency means it’s easy to identify what is a link, what is a button, what is an icon and what is body copy. It gives the user confidence in your website, and trains them to expect the same experience time and time again. That familiarity leads to repeat visitation.

Choose a consistent colour for your hyperlinks. We suggest one, such as blue, that no other element on the page is using. It’s also good practice to keep dexterity in mind for individuals with issues such as hand tremors. Generous button heights and text sizes make it easier for people to click, select or tab to a control, and go towards making your website WCAG compliant.

2. Design forms with labels.

The intent is not to clutter the page with unnecessary information, but to provide important cues and instructions that benefit people with disabilities.

A screen reader only recognises fields in a form when a label is included. Leaving labels out causes confusion for users, and we mean everyone here, not just those using screen readers. Label every form field appropriately.

3. Provide enough colour contrast.

Enough colour contrast helps people who are colour blind, have low vision or are legally blind, and the right contrast is visually appealing for everyone.

Despite a few exceptions, the practical application of contrast means the visual presentation of text and images of text has a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1. Black text on a white background sits at a ratio of 21:1, which passes with flying colours (pardon the pun). Red text on a purple background, by contrast, can fall to around 2:1, which is very hard to read.

Choose colours wisely; they can greatly impact the readability of words. To quickly test the contrast of your chosen palette, Colorable is a helpful resource.

4. Structure your website and content in a logical way.

Content that is organised logically renders in a meaningful way for screen readers.

Even if CSS is disabled, all elements of the website (navigation, content, images) should still flow using a coherent structure. For people using screen readers, that gives them the information in the order intended. With CSS off, the content should stack sensibly: navigation, then content, then image.

5. Be predictable.

The intent is to encourage consistent presentation and layout for users who interact with repeated content across a set of web pages and need to locate specific information or functionality more than once.

Web conventions exist for a reason. They mean you can recognise and navigate the web in a way that becomes familiar, no matter who you are or what your skill level is. Innovate by all means, but avoid breaking established conventions. Don’t place the main navigation in different areas on each page just for the sake of it.

Position elements so they are consistent from page to page. It reduces confusion as the user moves through the website, and creates a user-friendly, accessible experience.

6. Provide a breadcrumb trail.

A breadcrumb trail helps the user visualise how content has been structured and how to navigate back to previous pages, and may identify their current location within a series of pages.

Breadcrumbs help the user understand how the content is structured within the context of the website. They allow easy navigation back to previously viewed pages and let people know where they are, giving constant reinforcement that they’re in the right place. For example, Home / About Us / Our History tells the user they are three levels deep.

7. And one more…

It’s not quite a tip, but here’s an extra point worth mentioning: slideshows can be a barrier for users with screen readers.

One way around this is to use play and pause buttons so users can stop a slideshow at any point. Another is to provide text captions to assist the user. It could be the difference between people staying on your website that little bit longer to engage with your content, or not.

My WCAG experience. Putting my design to the test.

We’ve developed many WCAG-focused websites requiring web accessibility level AA to AAA, adjusting CSS and HTML to work within the insights we’d gathered. Crafting websites this way lets us create a successful experience for all user groups.

Testing our designs, prototypes and templates on real people gives us the best possible feedback. Past learnings have demonstrated that the guidelines are only guidelines. The only way you can be 100 percent sure your website is accessible is through user testing.

‘User testing is strongly recommended by the W3C, but is not mandatory when testing a website for accessibility compliance. However, when we conduct user testing we often find what we call “weird and wonderful” accessibility errors. These are things like the fact that most screen reader users who test for us don’t understand a Search box if it doesn’t have a label and has the word “Go” as a Submit button.’ – Gian Wild.

So, what do you think? Designing with web accessibility in mind isn’t as difficult as you first might have thought, right?

Go on and see if you can apply one or all of the seven tips to your designs. Then test your assumptions on real people and you’ll be on the road to accessibility in no time. Some issues will only come to light when the user is sitting in front of the computer.

Observe. Note it down. Fix it. Most of all, learn from it.

How a lack of accessibility is costing you fundraising dollars (and what to do about it).

You’re competing with more than 43,000 charities for every donor dollar. Overlooking accessibility means leaving some of them on the table.

If you didn’t think fundraising was already hard enough, consider this. Right now, you’re competing with more than 43,000 charities across Australia for every donor dollar. Some estimates place the figure as high as 60,000, though that number includes many registered charities people don’t consider ‘traditional’ charitable organisations.

Suffice to say, the landscape is extremely competitive. And for many charities and non-profits, donations and bequests represent the crucial source of income. In fact, donations accounted for 66% of all charity revenue in 2021.

While the pandemic proved financially stifling for many sectors, charities and NFPs on the whole have seen growth. Total sector revenue sits at around $174 billion, up from $155 billion in 2018.

The importance of digital channels in fundraising can’t be overlooked here. Over the past few years, when face-to-face fundraising became impossible, online donations offered a way for people to continuously engage in charitable giving.

According to a report by research agency McCrindle — ‘Understanding Australian givers to maximise the impact of not-for-profit organisations’ — online donations accounted for as much as 45% of people’s charitable contributions throughout this time. The next highest method of engagement? Volunteering, at a much lower 15%.

Important changes in the profile of Australian givers.

There are other changes afoot beyond growth in revenue and the increased importance of digital channels. The profile of the Australian giver is evolving.

‘Gen Z (78%) and Gen Y (66%) are the most likely to be opportunity givers, significantly more so than their older counterparts. Older Australians are more balanced in their approach, with 57% of Gen X being opportunity givers and 43% being committed givers.’

‘The older a giver gets, the more likely they are to be a committed giver.’

We can surmise from this data that while younger givers may respond to one-off, need-based initiatives — like digital campaigns highlighting specific causes, or eDMs eliciting support for a time-sensitive issue — older givers are much more likely to engage with an ‘always on’ donation mechanism that aligns with their donor behaviour. This is where the critical importance of accessibility comes into play.

Accessibility is key for everyone, but particularly for older donors.

Put simply, older Australians are a more likely source of committed and ongoing donation revenue. Incidentally, they also account for an increasing share of the Australian population.

If you don’t optimise your site and donation forms to make the experience of giving simple and straightforward for older donors, you’re likely losing out on potential donations.

Here’s how accessibility comes into the picture. Statistically speaking, older Australians are more likely to develop health conditions that mean they use technology in different ways. They may gradually lose motor control. Their vision may lessen over time. They may develop arthritis, making it difficult to use a standard computer mouse. They may suffer a stroke, with impacts on both cognitive and physical ability.

Accessibility means building products so that people have an excellent experience of your website regardless of their need or preference to use different technologies — like screen readers, for example — while engaging with the site.

The question becomes this: what are the indicators of a digital experience that is simple and straightforward for people with all preferences and abilities? Here are some of the techniques that organisations like Guide Dogs and Animals Australia have used with great success.

1. Provide clear and descriptive labels.

Context is crucial in navigation. If people can’t find their way to — or through — your donation form, it’s likely costing you in fundraising revenue. The same goes for any services or supports you provide.

Using descriptive labels ensures that all links accurately reflect the content or function people expect when they engage with different aspects of your site.

It’s helpful to think about the content that appears alongside a button or link, too. A little snippet of descriptive summary copy provides an additional layer of context for what happens once you click. A button for ‘For educators’, ‘For health professionals’ or ‘Make a referral now’ paired with a line describing what you’ll find is far more helpful and effective than a nondescript ‘Learn more’.

2. Build for people who navigate the web using keyboards.

Keyboards can be used to navigate the web and a range of digital experiences. People with conditions that affect motor control will be more inclined to use a keyboard than a traditional mouse.

Again, if people can’t navigate through your site, they cannot support your mission with donations. Guide Dogs take steps to ensure all navigation links and menus are easy to access via keyboard by building a ‘focus state’. This gives people strong, visible feedback when they are about to interact with a button or functional element, as opposed to informational content.

3. Use sufficiently contrasting colours.

High-contrast colours ensure all text and icons used in navigation are easy to identify against the background of your website. This helps people with certain types of low vision easily distinguish navigational elements — like menus or buttons — from other content.

Contrast is also important for people with colour blindness, for whom colour hue and saturation may have minimal or no effect on legibility. Minimum contrast ratios are calculated and assessed in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) so that colour is not a key factor, ensuring people with colour blindness have a legible distinction between text and backgrounds.

Throughout their site, Animals Australia use a scheme of light cream, orange and black. Considered guidelines for the use and application of these colours — which the team outline in a design system — ensure there is always appropriate contrast. Whether a page is predominantly light or dark, there’s always a high level of contrast for people with low vision or colour blindness.

4. Provide titles and alternative text.

Screen readers, like JAWS and NVDA, are a common form of assistive technology. People with low vision may use them to navigate your site. Providing titles and alternative text, again, removes barriers to navigation. The more seamless you can make the process of finding and processing a payment through the donation form — for everyone — the more likely your chance of conversion.

Screen readers pick up signals in the code of your website to provide audio descriptions of certain elements, helping the person orient themselves in relation to what’s on the page. For example, the screen reader will articulate what is a button and what is normal text. A title attribute lets the device read the title you’ve set for a link rather than the full URL. This makes for more concise, palatable reading and simpler navigation.

Guide Dogs also take special care to make all images more informative for people with low vision, by configuring alternative text (often referred to simply as alt text) so people understand the intent of the imagery. A photo can carry vital context, say a person making a cup of coffee to illustrate the skills you can learn through an Occupational Therapy Service. Good alt text provides the same context for people who can’t view the image: something like “Two people stand in the kitchen of a modern home. A smiling Guide Dogs Occupational Therapist supports a client in learning kitchen skills: specifically, boiling the kettle and making a pot of coffee.”

5. Use ARIA attributes.

Accessible Rich Internet Application (ARIA) attributes give screen readers more context about the purpose and functional state of menus, tabs and other navigational elements. This ensures people using screen readers have the same level of context as someone navigating the website visually.

The Guide Dogs sites feature navigation and search accessed from a ‘menu’ button. This button shows and hides a large menu, which relies on visual cues. By including an ‘aria-expanded’ tag, we can signal to the screen reader whether the menu is open or closed. Guide Dogs also use an ‘aria-label’ tag to replace the word ‘Menu’ with ‘Primary navigation and search menu’, so people understand the element’s function without visual cues.

6. Test with accessibility tools.

There are ways to learn what it’s like to use a screen reader while navigating your own website. By recreating a person’s experience, you can better adjust different elements of your site or donation form to make it easier for people to support your mission.

If you have a development team in-house, there’s also a range of tools you can use to stay constantly mindful of — and working in alignment with — the WCAG. Tools like Lighthouse, WAVE and axe can be especially valuable in testing and validating accessibility considerations.

Remember, though: no program or development tool can perfectly recreate what a real person needs or wants from your website. You should always strive to conduct facilitated user testing with people of all abilities. Guide Dogs has an excellent process whereby nothing is pushed live without a thorough program of in-person accessibility testing. Beyond aligning the site with users’ needs, it’s a valuable opportunity to learn about feature requests and updates your supporters may be eager to see.

Ask yourself: can you afford to neglect accessibility?

In reality, improving your emphasis on accessible design and development likely won’t change your fundraising fortunes overnight. It’s more of an accumulative proposition: the more you factor for accessibility, the more likely you are to capitalise on donations you may be missing now.

For an organisation like Guide Dogs — a vision support services provider — accessibility is paramount. So too, likely, for charities with any involvement in the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS).

For everyone else, you really have to ask: when you’re competing with 43,000+ other organisations for every single donor dollar, can you afford to exclude a potentially valuable market segment?

What Stevie Wonder can teach the world about accessible design.

“We need to make every single thing accessible to every person with a disability.” Eight tips and techniques we use to do exactly that.

Let’s start with an obvious statement: Stevie Wonder’s done some amazing things throughout his career.

He’s won 25 Grammy awards. He’s been awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Civil Rights Museum. He’s been named one of the United Nations’ Messengers of Peace. And, in 2014, Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

But for all of those achievements, there’s one specific moment in Stevie Wonder’s career that especially sticks in our minds. At the 58th Annual Grammy Awards — back in 2015 — Stevie Wonder announced the award for Song of the Year (which went to Ed Sheeran for ‘Thinking Out Loud’, before you Google it). Before announcing the award, Stevie offered this to the millions watching:

‘We need to make every single thing accessible to every person with a disability.’ – Stevie Wonder.

Cue rapturous applause. Not just from the people at the ceremony, but from us too; all the way over here in Australia. As designers and developers, we believe accessibility is paramount.

From an ethical perspective, accessibility is crucial. We want — and need — to create equitable experiences for as many people as possible, because meaningful access to digital information and services is a basic human right. Plus, many governments, private organisations and public sectors around the world have mandated accessibility requirements for digital service provision.

Creatively, accessibility is inspiring. Historically, designing for people with disabilities has driven many crucial technological innovations. Without designers and technologists focusing on accessible design, we likely wouldn’t have:

Auto-complete and predictive search, which was originally created to make life easier for people with disabilities.
Voice recognition technology and voice-controlled applications.
Some variants of artificial intelligence, which have progressed thanks to research initially done to provide greater context for people with low vision or blindness.

Lastly, there’s a clear and obvious business case for accessible design. People with disability represent around 15% of the world’s population. That’s roughly one billion people. And although they may not identify as people with disability, many members of our ageing population here in Australia will experience lowered vision and motor difficulties at some point in life. So accessible design is likely a consideration for even more people moving forward.

Each of these is a compelling case for accessible design in and of itself. But more broadly, wouldn’t you want to create products and experiences that everyone can enjoy? It just makes sense, really.

While there are established guidelines for accessible design and development, we’ve picked up a few tricks building highly regarded products for organisations like Guide Dogs, GenV, Mercy Health and the Alzheimer’s Society of Canada. Here are some tips and techniques we’ve learned along the way.

1. Be mindful of colour contrast, ratio and size of text.

What’s the consideration?

If you’re not careful with text decisions, people with low vision or blindness may have difficulty differentiating certain sections or components of the experience. For example, it’s tough to interact with a ‘get in touch’ button when the text and the size or shape of the button blends seamlessly into the background.

Page text should be large enough to read easily, and user interface components should be designed with sufficient contrast to the background. Try, too, to ensure that colour is not the only means of communicating information.

Things you can try:

For colour contrast, there are multiple tools available to check foreground and background combinations of all DOM elements. These help you determine whether there’s sufficient contrast for people with low vision and those with colour blindness.

For ratio and size of text, give people the ability to increase the text size on the site, and to strengthen contrast by converting into ‘black and white’ mode.

Small animations can also help people identify the interactive elements of a page. You can use hover states to show that a button is clickable; hover and focus states are also useful ways to indicate that a button or link is clickable or navigable for people using the keyboard. We also use ARIA roles on buttons, tabs and menu toggles to indicate their uses and states for people using screen readers. For example, identifying when the navigation menu is open and when it is closed.

Tools you can use:

Stark: a design plugin — compatible with Figma, Sketch, Adobe XD and more — which lets you quickly check contrast, simulate the experience of people who are colour blind, suggest colour combinations, and more.
Contrast ratio: provides a visual indication of text/background contrast, along with precise contrast-ratio information.
Contrast checker tools more generally.
The WAVE Chrome extension: a web accessibility evaluation tool developed by WebAIM.org. It provides visual feedback about the accessibility of your web content by injecting icons and indicators into your page.

2. Factor for accessible forms.

What’s the consideration?

Most forms have specific inputs that require high levels of interaction from the person filling them out. Remember the challenges with the ‘get in touch’ button that disappears into the background? Take those same challenges and imagine adding a credit card number, rather than just clicking on a button. Poorly designed or inaccessible forms can be problematic for people with low vision or motor-coordination difficulties.

Things to try:

Form fields should always be easily discoverable, so people can differentiate inputs from other components. Each field should have a clear visual state, for example Active, Hover, Focus or Disabled, and clear feedback on which element is currently focused, so when people type it’s clear which input they’re filling. Disabled or read-only elements should be treated as non-editable, and the screen reader should notify the person accordingly.
Ensure there’s a clear visual indication of any errors, with context explaining why an input is invalid (a mistyped email, or a phone number missing a country code) rather than just a visual cue in isolation. If the person submits with incorrect values, automatically focus the first invalid field so they don’t have to hunt through every input.
Always provide guidelines and assistive elements to help people give the right type of information. For example, if a field requires a phone number with an area code in brackets, tell the person you expect (09) 1234 5678 as the valid format.
Field lengths and structures should reflect the information you expect. A credit card’s expiration date should be a smaller field than the cardholder’s name. A ‘maxlength’ property can cap the characters for a field. For example, ‘expiry month’ and ‘expiry year’ will always be a maximum of two digits each.
Forms laid out vertically are easier to read and scan than those with side-by-side fields. That said, with labels above inputs and a vertical layout, it’s acceptable to split the form into two columns on large screens.
Form labels are crucial; it’s bad practice to leave them out in favour of placeholder text within the input. Placeholder text disappears as soon as the person types, making it hard to review the form before submitting. For easier scanning, keep labels above each field.

3. Validate design decisions by testing with people of all backgrounds, ages and abilities.

What’s the consideration?

Getting real people to engage with your proposed design is always illuminating. When you conduct user testing with a broad-spectrum demographic — and particularly with people who’ll engage using different technologies, like screen readers — it’s even more so.

Things to try:

This one’s pretty straightforward: conduct user-testing sessions with real people who are representative of the users who’ll interact with your product. It’s always valuable to follow accessibility guidelines, but don’t rely entirely on tools, scores and evaluations. Get your prototypes in front of real people!

4. Cater for people who navigate using the keyboard.

What’s the consideration?

Keep in mind that some people aren’t able to use a mouse or trackpad, and rely on the keyboard to navigate through sites. These people will innately use the ‘tab’ key, ‘shift+tab’ and the arrow keys to move through content. In our experience, keyboard users may also use other assistive technologies simultaneously, such as screen readers like VoiceOver or braille readers.

Things to try:

The focus state of any active component becomes extremely important for people to identify where they are on a page. Many native form elements have accessibility features built in, so be careful when using custom controls, like an interesting dropdown plugin, for example. Always check that any plugin has accessibility baked in and accommodates a keyboard-only approach to navigation.
If you’re using apps, plugins, widgets or JavaScript techniques that trap the keyboard — a pop-up modal, for example — make sure you provide a clear close button so people can leave the situation.
Test everything thoroughly yourself. Use your keyboard to navigate between all links, buttons, form fields and other features. The current focus should be easy to identify, and the order of movement should echo the visual layout. As you test, ask yourself: Can I access all features? Can I operate all controls? Is it reasonably easy to identify where I am on the page at any time? Does the focus wrap within the entire page or modal dialogue?

Resources you can use:

The University of Washington’s Keyboard Accessibility Checklist.
WCAG’s guidelines for keyboard control functionality.

5. Be considerate of screen readers.

What’s the consideration?

When you’re designing the layout of a product, interface or experience, you’ll usually start by thinking about colours, fonts, whitespace, imagery and more. When you design with accessibility in mind — and specifically, to cater for people with blindness — you have to be mindful of whether these visual cues can be repurposed or replicated by a screen reader.

Things to try:

Avoid autoplay on any videos. While this practice is generally bad for accessibility, the sound in a video that begins to play automatically will drown out the audio cues provided by the screen reader.
Always use meaningful directional copy, particularly for buttons and links. People need clear direction on what they’ll accomplish or where they’ll go by clicking. Take ‘click here to contact us’. If the link is simply ‘click here’, the person won’t have enough information on what will happen once they click.
On the topic of copy, cater for descriptive alt text when you upload photographic imagery. Alt text provides a narrative for the contents of each image that the screen reader can relay, rather than describing the image as ‘picture’ or ‘photo’.
Use ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Application) tags to give screen readers additional information about what’s happening. For example, a modal can have an ARIA role of ‘dialog’, which instructs the screen reader to announce it as a dialog box, so the person knows they’re interacting with a modal rather than browsing the main content of the page.

6. Don’t hide any information in hovers.

What’s the consideration?

Make sure you don’t hide any information through the use of hovers. For example, say you have a card element with an image as its default state, and supplementary text describing the content is only revealed on mouseover. A person navigating via keyboard will only be able to identify the image, not the additional content triggered by the hover. People who use their keyboard rely on all actionable items being visible on screen.

Things to try:

Using focus indicators is a great way to make sure all information is discoverable. Focus is key to guiding people through their experience of an interface. Focus indicators give people context as to where they are on a page, ensuring no context is hidden or missed as people navigate.

7. Avoid over-reliance on animations and transition effects.

What’s the consideration?

Fast animation and transition effects — like visual animations for page loading, for example — can cause people with photosensitivity to experience nausea, headaches, and in extreme cases even trigger seizures. Parallax scrolling effects can also cause symptoms similar to vertigo, due to vestibular sensitivity.

Things to try:

Keep all animations slow and subtle. Any animation effect you use shouldn’t last more than a couple of seconds.
If you use any GIFs, make sure they aren’t on an infinite loop.
In some cases, people can enable a setting indicating they prefer ‘reduced motion’, at the operating-system level or the browser level. Either way, developers can respect that request and provide an experience with reduced (or no) animation effects.

8. Always use established conventions that people are familiar with.

What’s the consideration?

Regardless of accessibility considerations, your new website is probably not the first digital interface people will have visited. As with most user-experience design, consistency of convention is key. People with low vision, blindness, motor-coordination challenges or any other accessibility consideration will likely already be well versed in other conventions of digital design. You can and should rely on conventions like underlined hyperlinks, navigating through the header and footer, and more.

Things to try:

Leverage predictable patterns and established conventions where possible, and keep the interface consistent throughout the entire experience. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel!
Avoid ambiguous terms for navigation, and use familiar icons and symbols if you’re using them to provide additional context as directional cues.

So there you have it. Hopefully now you’re ready and raring to embrace accessible design with some of the tools, tips and techniques we use every day.

Stevie Wonder may have been very superstitious, but he makes an incredibly salient point, and one that’s worth closing on:

‘We need to make every single thing accessible to every person with a disability.’ – Stevie Wonder.

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