Guest Post:

#Millennialchat.ter Joseph Jon Lanthier, buildOn‘s Web Editor and Social Media Writer writes today about the process of web redevelopment.  He and the buildOn team (@buildOnEmpowers) recently redeveloped their website, and next week they will be joing @MillennialChat to serve as a case study for next week’s theme:

“What do we, #millennials, look for in a company’s website?”

Obligatory online revisions can often get philosophical. At buildOn, we recently launched a new website – http://buildOn.org – after months of development. I was proud to be a part of this project; it provided a chance to help construct an online home from virtually the ground up (or is it “from the virtual ground up”?). But before a single line of php code was written, we knew that:

We had to think about who we were, analyze our current site, recognize where the shortcomings were, and create a plan for overcoming them.

This new site was created in part to help better define the culture of buildOn for younger and more social media-savvy audiences than we usually attract. We are, in part, attempting to reach Millennial donors, both because they can help spread word of the work we do and because, like our students, they represent the future. (I should mention that I say this as a modest Millennial.)

During the research phase, the buildOn team and myself examined a number of nonprofit websites, most of which have been very successful at targeting Millennials. They all have a few things in common, such as lucid calls-to-action and awesomely clean designs.

They don’t look like nonprofit websites.

This of course begs the question of what a nonprofit website is supposed to look like, but the point is that on the web, it doesn’t matter if you’re a fast food chain, an expressionist painter, or a youth service organization. Online, you’re really nothing more, and nothing less, than a brand – and brands are defined more by philosophy than action (though both are essential).

flickr photo by Sean MacEntee

With this in mind, we got to work. buildOn has encompassed so many efforts over the years that making our mission statement digestible was quite a task. We’ve been constructing schools abroad and empowering urban high school students for two decades, and we’ve got the stats and studies to prove that our programs have lasting impact.

BUT..

• How do you compress the emotion of all of that into a single paragraph, or even one sentence?
• How do you make it relevant to the twenty-something sitting in Starbucks and browsing the net on a laptop without alienating more tradition corporate supporters?

We decided that most of this highwire act would be accomplished pictorially. Kudos must be given to our ace in-house graphic designer and emigre from Nepal, Srijan Tamrakar, for instilling the images on the site with so much universal vibrancy. Our new Who We Are page also tells the story of buildOn with bite-sized scenarios that offer fleshtones and human context, something our original website lacked.

Here’s another example. 95% of our graduating afterschool students may go on to college, but 95% is a number and not a story. The narrative lies in the journey those teens take through their own crumbling backyards, volunteering with the elderly and completing environmental work. And having seen what an impact they can have, those teens go on to become doctors, lawyers, and public officials that can make significant social and economic changes.

By focusing on the limitless emotional experience of our programs’ impact–with well chosen pictures, graphics, and quotes–and not the longitudinal quantification, we hope to show Millennials and other audiences the limitless impact that their support can have, too.

All websites are organic, constantly changing. And even our new design is not complete, as we’re now entering the crucial testing phase. But so far it’s been a robust reminder that oftentimes revising your aesthetic and message for key demographics involves a lot of self-searching.

The question might not be so much “How do we get Millennials, or any audience, to care about us?” as it is “How do we explain to an audience what we care about and why?”