Last week I had a conversation with a comms person at a small charity to give them a few tips to help them start their website redesign project. I’ve had similar conversations in the past so I thought it’d make a useful article.
In most small charities the comms person isn’t a digital specialist and already has a workload that would keep at least two people busy. So the prospect of building a new website can be quite daunting. This is why it’s easy to fall prey to agencies who promise to take the full burden away. In some cases you might just strike lucky and get a genuine gem of an agency. But there are downsides to this solo agency arrangement.
Having just a single digital supplier means that the agency becomes business critical and any disagreement or poor service means your whole digital presence is at risk. My recommendation is always to spread your eggs in more than one basket – at the very least having your hosting and your development suppliers separate. You should also aim to have your CMS not owned by the agency but being a piece of software in its own right.
I’ve been in the situation where our charity website was hosted, supported and developed all by one agency and they went into administration. Many frantic phone calls, legal discussions, and strong words later we were forced into contracting the agency which had bought out the intellectual property of the original agency. The new agency turned out to be overly expensive and not totally trustworthy. It wasn’t very long before the trustees agreed to fund a complete rebuild instead!
Of course budget and resource is always limited in charities. Quite rightly we’re lean in order to make the donor’s pound go the furthest it can. So an obvious question to ask is whether your new website could use free open source technology. Open source used to be like a curse word to many IT teams but times have changed. Some open source platforms have been around a long time and have huge levels of support available.
At BHF we’re in the process of bringing in two open source platforms; Magento for ecommerce and Drupal for community. Amongst other things, we chose this route because it means we’re independent from any single development house or software owner. Which means you can choose the possibly cheaper route of using freelance developers. Of course the knock on is that you need to ensure appropriate documentation exists so that knowledge can be transferred between developers easily.
Of course there’s lots more things you should consider. But these two areas are the ones that the non-digital specialists I’ve talked to have needed most guidance on. So in summary:
- don’t put all your eggs in one basket – keep your hosting and development suppliers separate, and your CMS not custom built by the agency.
- open source CMS can save you money, give you independence, and offer the possibility for you to use freelancers.
- if you use more than one development supplier (agency or freelancer) make sure you get them to create / update documentation so you have ‘guidebook’ you can give to your next supplier.
And my final tip which seemed to strike a chord in the conversation I had this week – always ask about a charity discount during the face to face pitch meeting. The worse they can do is say no – but my experience is that you usually get something either some pro-bono extras or a genuine discount!
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