Realizing Your Organization's Mandate Online

By Christine Spinder, Zoe House Media
May 2001

In developing or redesigning your Web site, you should first address how your Web site can best address your organization's goals.

All Web site content, structure, interactivity and marketing should serve your organization's goals first. In civil society organizations, your goals are the needs of your community and your audiences, and creating more avenues for access to your programs and services. A Web site that is only an organizational structure chart is far from meeting its potential.

What are the primary goals of your organization? Particularly on a Web site, these can best be conveyed as activities:

• Education: how to maintain a well, increase nutrition, lobby for policy change, etc.
• Issue Awareness: why these changes must happen—history, context, foundation
• Community Outreach: new audiences, new communities
• Advocacy: to government and policy-makers
• Public Mobilization: for involvement in large campaigns
• Discussion: to explore issues, impacts and share solutions
• Project Coordination: between stakeholders and members
• Promotion: of your programs and services
• Calls to Action: immediately trigger action online—respond, question, send comments, participate in a forum, etc.

How your organization structures the delivery of these activities, in other words your administrative structure, probably doesn't matter to a new client or member. They want to know what you can offer them, the answers to their questions, and know that you are concerned with their needs first.

Some people will find your Web site through search engines, looking for resources on specific questions, with specific needs. Some will reach your Web site while exploring, following links form other sites. To engage online audiences, your language, content and architecture must be immediately apparent with your messages from the first screen. They may access your Internet presence, whether Web site, discussion group or listserv, at a community centre, a school, at home, or an Internet cafe. Each has its restrictions.

Take advantage of the multimedia capacity of Web sites to fulfill audience's specific needs for graphic representation on information, the amount of content on each page and the ease of returning to already viewed material through navigational trails.

Good Web sites do far more than simply present information. Like all communication activities, well-strategized Internet tools promote change through action.

SD Case Study

WAVE Health Collective: Promoting Action Online
Through intelligent use of the Web, a collective focused on rural women's health and literacy doubled its program participants in two years, made women's literacy a community issue and empowered women to support each other to create learning opportunities for better health.