In my work with nonprofits to improve and redesign their websites, I often find that one of my most impactful contributions I make is asking high-level questions about the organization itself.
- Who do you serve?
- What do your supporters care about most?
- How will this feature or information directly help someone when they put down their phone and move on with their day?
I ask these questions to understand how the organization’s priorities, vision, and assumptions came together to produce a website.
- Do people actually ask this “Frequently Asked Question” a lot via email, phone calls, or in person?
- Why do you ask this question on your application form?
- Which of your programs serves the most people?
But the questions are certainly valuable beyond the scope of the site. I’ve had multiple organizations tell me that our website project helped them better understand their entire organization. (That’s pretty much the best complement I could ask for.)
That brings me to a question I find myself asking more and more: “What has changed?”
One reason I like this question so much is that things do change! Websites shouldn’t be static because organizations aren’t static. A site needs to evolve with the nonprofit it serves. Otherwise, the mismatches in organizational needs and the website become increasingly stark and, eventually, discrediting. It’s very healthy to enter a conversation with the assumption that things change and the curiosity to learn what that change is.
For people deep in day-to-day operations, it’s easy to miss slow-creeping changes. Especially when working with organizations and website intermittently, as I often do, requests for changes or support can feel as if they appear out of thin air. I know there is context and past conversations that have lead to this moment, but those aren’t included in a 3-line email.
- Has the organization changed how they deliver a service or program?
- Have donations dropped following a website update?
- Is the intended audience of the website different now than when the website was first build?
- Has the city, county, state, or federal government cut your funding? ðŸ˜
There are always reasons behind a person’s request for help or support (usually good ones!), but it’s hard to understand the request without more context.1 When consulting, I’m usually thinking about user experience best practices, accessibility best practices, information architecture, technical constraints, long-term stability, ease of editing, and more. It’s very hard to do that in response to a question like: “Can we change the color of the donate button?”
In a field as complex as web design and development, someone’s first idea or what another site is doing is not always the best way to achieve a specific objective. Getting to the thinking behind the request does wonders.
That’s why “What has changed?” can be so effective. Even when the answer isn’t a particularly good one2, it gives you the information to help you move forward. Try it the next time you get a confusing request for support, and see if it helps!
- There are definitely situations where it’s important help someone in the way they ask to be helped. However, I find that in website consulting, things are usually going poorly when I resign myself to being a “yes-man.” ↩︎
- “We have a new board member who used to work for Microsoft.” ↩︎