The calling card of any organization in this digital age is its website.  Last year, when NGA’s strategic planning process included a revision of our vision and mission statements (more on that later), we knew we’d want to soon update these on our website.

As we took a look how best to do this, we saw a larger opportunity. While our current website version had served us admirably for the last five years, there were some key ways in which we wanted to better engage the world around us. Rather than just provide information, we wanted to engage our audience. We wanted to shine a brighter, more compelling light on the scale of clothing insecurity and our unique approach to providing dignity.

There were two main phases we went through: ideation and implementation.

The first phase of ideation was largely internal. We first created a list of all potential audiences (funders, suppliers, partners, general public, volunteers, and more). Then we went through a ‘jobs to do’ process, where we thought about all of the functions a website would provide to those audiences. This is meant to be a cast-the-net-wide exercise, which we then prioritize and condense: a relatively small website on a budget can’t be 50 things to 10 personas, so we tried to be laser focused on the most important outcomes.

With those goals in mind, we turned to implementation. This was facilitated by two partners we recommend highly: Lauren Muth of ­Studio Humankind and Zach Thanasilangkul of Mission Driven Impact. Zach and his team helped us create a new communications strategy for the site, one that took our newly more focused vision & mission and brought them to life. Then Lauren created a visual design and built a site that best served our desired use cases. We thank both of them for their support and expertise in this work.

As a final change, we will now use nationalgivingalliance.org as our main domain, rather than nga-inc.org. While longer, we hope this will be easier to remember when sharing our website in conversation.

Though a website is a technical product with many important technology choices along the way, the realization of a website’s purpose is through words and visuals. That content, both text and creative, is critical to capture the attention of a donor, to catalyze the support of a new volunteer, to articulate our helping hand to individuals in need.

We hope you enjoy our new website!