denise mcdermott — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 20:16:24 GMT

Thanks for writing this article. I think there needs to be a lot of discussion about these differences within the technology and design community. What I find interesting is that it was an easy transition for you to work with nonprofits after having a forprofit career. As someone who has worked as the lead web strategist, content developer, marketer, designer, and campaigner I find it is difficult to transfer those skills to the forprofit environment.

As the lead in developing websites and web campaigns, I have worked with the larger CMSs, and agree wholeheartedly that nonprofits believe that those investments will lead to more donors or members. The trouble is, that most do not have the resources/time or content creators/moderators to implement the tools.

In your experience, what were the primary tools that helped you to “sell” good UX design to your nonprofit clients. And what of your forprofit experience were they most interested in learning about. Do you provide any competitive analysis, metrics analysis, mulitvariate testing etc. In my experience, it seems nonprofits respond more to data than to “creative” expertise.

denise mcdermott — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 21:05:16 GMT

Great article and thanks for starting the dialog. When working with nonprofits, it is especially important to figure out the overall content strategy before writing any web copy. That, in itself, I have found to be quite a hurdle, as long term planning and evaluation of the core content outputs of any organization might conflict with their stated business goals (ie donate, volunteer). As a designer then, who may not be empowered to do this content evaluation/restructuring, flexibility is probably the most important consideration. This of course, should not be the long term perspective, but those of us working in the field often have to evangelize a focused content strategy, while also dealing with short term design needs.

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by denise mcdermott