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Understanding your website’s audience is essential to the success of your organization’s digital presence. No organization’s audience is entirely uniform—your website users are unique individuals with varying needs, and your digital strategy should recognize that.
According to Maze’s 2023 Continuous Research Report, 74% of product team members believe research is effective or partially effective in decision-making at their organizations. User research allows you to get to know your target audience on a deeper level and design your website to better meet their needs. As a result, your community organization can work toward its mission more effectively and help more people.
Let’s explore four audience research tips to help you understand your website audience. Along the way, we’ll highlight examples from top nonprofit websites to illustrate the benefits of audience research.
Ask for direct user feedback.
Our first suggestion is one of the most straightforward steps you can take to get to know your audience better—just ask! Go directly to your website visitors to get their takes on your site’s user experience, design, and accessibility.
The Maze report found that user interviews are the most frequently used research method, with 65% of respondents saying they have used them systematically or often in the past 12 months.
You can conduct user interviews by asking for volunteers via your social media and email platforms who would be willing to join a focus group to provide website feedback. You can also create a survey directly on your website that visitors can complete when they’re already there.
No matter which research method you choose, ask questions that help get to the root of the visitor experience, such as:
- How did you find our website? Search engine, social media, direct search, referral from another website, etc.
- What action did you seek to take on our website? Completing a registration form, donating, creating an online account, reading blog articles, learning about the organization, etc.
- Were you able to successfully complete your intended action? If not, what was the main barrier you faced?
- Did you run into any accessibility issues when using our website? Examples include low color contrast, lack of alt text, poor mobile functionality, and poor keyboard navigation.
- Do you have any suggestions for improving our website? Design, accessibility, usability, and content recommendations are all appreciated.
When conducting in-person interviews, don’t be afraid to ask follow-up questions to help volunteers accurately describe the issues or opportunities they’ve noted on your website. For online interviews, thank respondents with a prompt follow-up email after they complete the form.
Then, compile responses from all interview methods to identify common points of feedback from your audience. This will provide a helpful starting point for enhancing your website to better meet users’ expectations.
Gather indirect visitor input.
Indirect user feedback, which is data your organization gathers about your audience without specifically requesting it, can be just as valuable as direct feedback for understanding your audience’s thoughts and feelings about your website.
Indirect feedback encompasses the subconscious ways audience members use your website without necessarily noticing they’re doing it. For example, a visitor might let you know in an in-person interview that they found your blog posts very engaging. However, through a user session recording, you might discover that they only spent about 15 seconds browsing your blog posts before clicking away.
Your organization can use the following tools to collect indirect user input:
- Website analytics. Solutions like Google Analytics allow you to assess website visitor data to understand how people find and use your site. Meyer Partners’ nonprofit analytics guide recommends using an analytics tool to track data points such as session duration, organic search traffic, referral traffic, and conversion rates for forms like your volunteer sign-up form or online donation page.
- Heat maps. A website heat map is a visual representation of the user experience using colors to signify which areas of your website are most and least engaging for visitors. Warm-toned, red areas are more popular, while cooler tones like green and blue denote less popular site aspects. You can use a tool like Hotjar to access user heatmaps, which provide information about the buttons and links users click, how users scroll through your pages, and common usability barriers visitors encounter.
- User session recordings. These are videos depicting a user’s browsing session on your website. They encompass cursor movements, clicks, taps, and scrolling. Like heatmaps, these tools allow you to see what actual users experience when visiting your website and determine how effectively you meet their needs.
Use a combination of these tools to get a well-rounded picture of your site’s user experience and audience needs. Your indirect user feedback can help you learn about your audience’s intentions when visiting your site and adjust your strategy to facilitate a smoother user experience.
Develop user personas.
User personas are representations of different segments of your website audience based on quantitative and qualitative audience research.
Developing personas helps you understand common motivations and pain points for your target audiences. You can use direct and indirect website feedback, along with data from your organization’s CRM, to create user personas.
Let’s examine the website of Covenant House, a community organization devoted to supporting youth experiencing homelessness, as an example of a site that puts user personas to good use. The website’s “Get Involved” main menu item offers multiple engagement options based on visitors’ interests. Each item corresponds to a different user persona. For example:
Alt text: Covenant House’s “Get Involved” website menu items, including multiple ways to donate and options to become an advocate, receive alumni information, or volunteer
- “Ways to Give” offers options for visitors who want to donate to the organization
- “Be an Advocate” leads to resources for users interested in advocating for the organization’s mission among the wider community
- “For Alumni” spotlights resources for individuals who formerly received support from Covenant House
- “Volunteer” connects prospective volunteers with opportunities to get involved in service
To develop user personas for your website, consider the different audiences your organization serves. For community organizations, user personas typically include donors, volunteers, advocates, and beneficiaries, but your main segments may different depending on your unique mission.
Remember that your community wants to support your fundraising and philanthropic efforts. By creating user personas, you can identify the different ways your audience may want to get involved and ensure your website offers tailored resources for each group.
Reference audience research when updating your website.
The natural next step to take after gathering audience feedback and creating user personas is to use that information to update and optimize your website.
Kanopi’s guide to user personas explains that you can use audience research and personas to develop better:
- User journeys, or the use of navigation aspects like your main menu and top-level buttons to help different personas find the information they seek
- Calls to action, such as buttons and links tailored to various visitor needs and motivations
- Content strategies, including storytelling strategies tailored to different audience interests
Incorporate audience research into your ongoing nonprofit website maintenance activities to continually improve your site based on new user feedback and personal information. For example, you may update your site to respond to demographic shifts in your community or the release of new technology that allows your organization to collect more detailed indirect audience feedback.
If these audience research processes seem daunting to you, you don’t have to go it alone. Reach out to a website design professional for support. These experts can facilitate every step of the audience research and website optimization process, from exploring user behaviors and developing personas to updating your site for a better user experience.
Regardless, these audience research tips and tools will provide the foundation you need to keep your stakeholders’ needs at the forefront of your web design and development efforts.