Connection Café: Think Outside the Site

	Think Outside the Site
	Posted by at Apr 16, 2008 01:29 PM CDT Categories: Content Management, Nonprofit Trends, Technology

Being married to a talented and beautiful anthropologist, I have found myself seeing the world through her lens more over the years. Recently, I noticed that I’ve been paying lots of attention to how the language we use to describe our experience shapes our perceptions about things. This affects how we see ourselves, interact with others, and solve problems.

Stop Talking About Your “Web Site”
I talk with a lot of people about how they plan to use online tools to support their organization’s mission and goals. When I listen to the language we use to describe what we’re doing, their language tends to focus on our “web site.” As in, “we need to reach more people with our web site” or “our web site needs to be bigger.”

When an executive director pushes us to focus on a project around our “web site” to increase donations or signups or whatever, it’s not enough. It’s too narrow a definition of what, how and where we engage our constituents online.

Think about it.

Our web site exists within the much larger landscape that includes a sea of email, the mountain range called social networking, and search outposts dotting the hills. If we don’t consider these things (and only focus on the web site) we’ve limited our ability to reach new audiences, drive more traffic, encourage donations, and engage more activists.

Start Talking About Your “Web Presence”
What I’m suggesting is that we need new language to describe what we’re doing for our organizations online. So let’s consider thinking out side the web site and start thinking about our “web presence.”

Let your web presence include thing like your:

Organizational or corporate web site
Micro (or program oriented) sites
Editorial calendars for email and web content
Presence on social networking sites like Facebook
Social media sites like Flickr
Marketing through search engines

Even if your organization doesn’t want to have a blog or twitter strategy today, it’s important to consider those things outside of your site if even to put them on the shelf for a while. If we start by talking about our web site, we’ve already shut the door to many things that will make us successful. So please, call it your web presence. You'll be glad you did.