Five Steps to Planning Web-Based Initiatives

You can save your nonprofit organization time, money, and headaches by investing in a solid plan before seeking funding for or launching into the development of a Web-based initiative. Whether you’re building a Web site, an intranet, a database, or setting up an email system or server, solid planning can make it easier to raise funds and to ensure that the final product will be appropriate, flexible, and lasting.

Planning for Web technology is frequently overlooked by nonprofits, often because it is perceived as something that is elusive, yields only marginal benefits, and consumes valuable staff time. Isn’t it just easier to roll up your sleeves and start building?

Such an approach is risky. From years of experience as consultants to non-profits we have learned that poorly planned Web projects nearly always end up taking longer and costing more than originally anticipated. Also, inadequately planned systems are more prone to bugs and are difficult to build upon in the future.

With a solid project plan, you can identify precisely what resources and costs will be involved in the initiative, identify funding sources that are relevant to your project, and make it clear to your funders that you are accountable for your work.

Funders need to know that their money is well spent. Good strategic planning can help your funders clearly measure their return on their investment in you. Presenting funders with solid evidence of positive ROI (return on investment) will help to foster good long-term relationships with them, making it easier for you to win future grants.

So how can you go about developing a useful Web development plan that meets these goals? We've found that there are five core steps to planning nearly any successful Web initiative:

1. Clearly define your objectives and audience.
2. Determine how you can empirically measure the success (or lack thereof) of the project.
3. Define system specifications.
4. Develop a content plan.
5. Construct a management and maintenance plan.

Defining Your Objectives and Audience

First, you will need to clearly define the objectives of your Web-based initiative. Throughout this phase you should ask yourself, “Why are we doing this?” “What do we expect to gain?” and “When do we expect to see results?” Make your answers to these questions as specific as possible. You can condense your answers into a written statement of purpose to which everyone involved in your project can refer. Such a document will help keep everyone focused on the same concrete goals.

You will need to maintain a clear picture of the intended audience for your Web initiative; understanding your audience is critical to reaching your objectives.

In order to better understand your end-users and their requirements, you can segment your audience by their characteristics and describe how each segment should use the system. You should also identify any constraints that may arise due to disabilities, bandwidth connections, and other elements, so that they can be factored into the system’s design early on.

Measuring Success

Once you have defined your site's objectives and intended audience, you can develop tangible metrics to help you determine your success in meeting your objectives. For example, if you are planning a Web site redevelopment project and one of your objectives is to set up an online donations system, how much money will you have to take in via this system in order to make its construction and maintenance worthwhile? How long are you willing to invest in this system until you reach this target? Having benchmarks like these in place and the metrics to measure them before actually building the system will help you more accurately determine what would be an appropriate investment and when to pull the plug, if necessary.

As a nonprofit, it is likely that your success will not always be evaluated in monetary terms. This presents a unique challenge, but one for which Internet technology is particularly well suited. In the Web site development example mentioned above, let’s assume that a second objective is to increase awareness of a specific program. While this can be difficult to evaluate in the offline world, on the Web you can look at how many people have visited the program-related pages on your site. A strong increase in these empirical figures would point towards success. A stagnation or decrease in visits to relevant pages would suggest that the initiative had little effect.

Most Web servers are configured to record a wealth of data on the usage of your Web site. This data is then stored in specialized log files, which can be easily mined to generate valuable statistics on your site's usage (for example, how many people visit your site, what pages they look at, how long they stay, where on the Web they arrived from). Statistics like these can easily be tracked over time to help measure the success of your Internet initiatives.

Defining System Specifications

Once you have clearly determined your objectives, audience, and metrics to measure success, it is time to develop your product specifications. Here, you should define the system features, user roles, business requirements, and infrastructure. In the case of a simple Web site, a well thought-out site map can be an ideal way to define system specifications. For higher-end projects, a written system requirements document (outlining both technical and business requirements) can be instrumental in providing a clear plan for everyone working on the project. If your system is using a database, you should map the database schema in this phase. Depending on the complexity of the applications you intend to build, you may want to create an application component model that outlines the architecture of the application on a high level.

When making your decisions about infrastructure, you should look at which type of database and programming language(s) to use, decide upon a hosting arrangement, and identify any third-party services that may need to be integrated.

Developing a Content Plan

Once your product specifications are complete, you can hand them to the system developers and focus on creating a content plan. Every Web-based system contains content, be it text, images, documents, database records, or multimedia. Once the product specifications are drawn up, you should have agood sense of what kind of content you will need in order to populate the site. In many cases, you will likely be using a combination of legacy (pre-existing) content along with new material. Because implementing content is often the most time-consuming part of a Web project, it is important here to determine: where the content will come from, who will generate the content, who will review and edit it, and who will be ultimately responsible for implementing it. To ensure your project goes smoothly, you should create your content plan as soon as reasonably possible.

Planning for Management and Maintenance

The final step in planning a successful Web-based initiative addresses managing and maintaining the system once it has been built and put into service. Systems without such a plan often languish and become stale, reducing their usefulness. Relying on an outside party to maintain the system is one possibility, but that can end up being expensive and inefficient. You may also want to consider looking at a content management, database management, or Web site management system as a tool you can use to manage the system day-to-day. Such systems allow non-technical staff to manage different areas of the system with little or no training.

Conclusion

Once these planning steps are complete, your project is much more likely to be smooth and result in an appropriate, useful, and scalable system. Of course, having such a plan can also facilitate the funding process, since you will know what resources you will need. You will also be able to show your funders that you have done your due diligence and can be held accountable in an objective manner for their investment in you.