It’s been on your communications plan for a while now but you’ve decided: this is the year for your charity’s new website. Of course, there’s lots to think about and plan, from getting the budget approved to choosing an agency to design the website.
One thing to watch for is that all too often in web projects, copy can come way down on the to-do list. This can end up wasting resources – and make things pretty stressful.
Creating well-structured, focused and on-brand website copy should be a driving element of your redesign project. After all, your website is your go-to resource for most of your audiences. It needs to provide what your audience has come to find and meet your charity’s own objectives.
For this, you need well-crafted words – ones that align with your main communications resources. And that means you need time, investment and collaboration to get those things ready before you start rewriting your website copy.
Here’s how to start…
1. Consider strategy and brand
First, think about your organisational strategy
What do you want your audiences to do? That’s a vital question when you’re creating any website copy because each page should have an action you want your audience to take. This should be aligned with your organisation’s objectives. For example, say your strategic objective is to increase referrals to a specific service in the next five years. You can make sure you’re including an action to refer people to this service across the website.
Or, perhaps it’s your goal to start doing more campaigning in a specific area. This will need to be reflected in the campaigning section of your web copy.
If you don’t have an organisational strategy, consider pausing the new website plan so you can agree on one first. It’s much easier to produce consistent, well-structured, audience-focused web copy when important brand and strategy documents and processes have been agreed first. You can read more about the importance of integrated communications in One Voice: A Best Practice Guide to integrated communications.
Build a case for support
How do you ask people for donations succinctly? And how do you explain what difference people make when they donate to your cause? If you haven’t agreed on this across your charity, doing so before you create website copy is a good idea. If you don’t, you might end up with inconsistent wording across your communications which is not good for brand awareness. Find out more about writing a case for support.
Think about tone of voice
It’s essential that you know how to speak to different audiences that come to your website. Creating tone of voice guidelines is a project that takes time. Get your tone right and agreed on before you start creating web copy. Doing so will mean the content creation process will go more smoothly because you’ll have some boundaries in place for what is on-brand copy.
Create boilerplate copy
This is copy that describes who you are and what you do. It will go on the “About us” section of your website. The About us page shouldn’t be a new iteration of this content. The page needs to reflect how you describe yourselves in other communications – a bit like an elevator pitch. It’s likely that this content could need reviewing before you start your website project to make sure it’s reflective of your current brand.
Agree key messages
Your new website has to consistently reflect who you are and what you say. This can be achieved with key messages. It will be much quicker, easier and straight forward to write new website content if you have taken time to agree on key messages in advance. Check out the ones Scouts’ have created for themselves for inspiration.
2. Consider process
Get buy-in from colleagues
Things don’t happen in a vacuum – you’ll need input from teams across your organisation when you write your website content. For example, you may need to talk to senior management about why you need the resources mentioned above – like a tone of voice guide or case for support – before you can write new website copy. Follow sector advice on getting buy-in and show them brand awareness research. Ideally, you’d have evidence for senior colleagues, whether it’s a SurveyMonkey asking supporters about their understanding of what you do or more formal research. This might mean drawing on the services of external agencies if your brief and budget allow.
Organise training for colleagues
Once you have your tone of voice guidelines, organise training for members of staff across your teams. That way, they can write raw material that is more likely to be in your brand voice for you to perfect.
To encourage collaboration, you could consider coming up with some content principles with colleagues.
Also, think about how you will give teams access to the documents they need to write web copy. For example, your case for support. This might be on a project management system like Trello. You can also use it to add checklists for what needs to happen when, allocate deadlines and share tasks across teams.
Think about user journeys, accessibility, and segmenting audiences
Use your Google Analytics data to figure out how audiences are interacting with your current site. How do they move across it? What’s working in the copy on pages that are popular? What’s not working on pages that aren’t seeing many visitors? Or, as Rethink Mental Illness did, ask your supporters how they use your website, including how accessible they think it is.
As you know, charity communications need to be audience-focused, so thinking about who these people are at the beginning of your redesign project is vital. You might need to create different sections for different audiences and this is much easier to do earlier on.
Use this insight, along with the work you have done on your strategy and brand, to go through all of your current web content and decide what needs to be updated and changed. Think about how many pages need to be edited and written from scratch so you have a sense of the scale of the work ahead.
3. Create a brief
Finally, to create powerful on-brand web copy, you need a focused brief. If you’re asking colleagues to write content for you, they will need to know things like:
- The action you want people to take – like donating or calling your helpline
- How you want your audience to feel – inspired, excited, surprised?
- What tone the copy should use – perhaps it needs to be bold, friendly or professional
- SEO terms to include
- Key messages
- Where you want people to go next on the site – maybe it’s to download a report, sign a petition or to the contact page
- Where the copy sits on the site map
If you’re commissioning copy externally, you’ll need to tell writers where the raw material for the content will come from. For example, will the fundraising team provide summaries of major events?
To be able to answer these briefing questions, you need to have thought about all of the things above. So, take the time to get everything in place first to make sure your new website has the best chance of success.
Other useful resources
- Brand 360: A Best Practice Guide
- How to make ‘sign off’ less stressful
- Making the case for communications
- Building in accessibility from the beginning
We explored website content at our Digital Conference 2022 – head on over to the event page to catch up on-demand.
Banner Image: Engin Akyurt on Pexels
