Creating an organized and well thought out feature wishlist for your association's website is the first step to making improvements on your website that will drive engagement and have a positive impact on your association's growth. Finding a developer who can execute a to-do list is easy, but before you sign off on any action items, we strongly recommend taking the time to strategize which new features will bring you the return on investment and improve the performance of your website. 

Your starting point to compile your impactful feature wishlist will be to review your association's business goals. Setting SMART goals is important for defining and measuring success, including the success of your website. What do you want your visitors to do when they are on your website? Is it easy for them to access the info you want them to find and perform the tasks you want them to do? Are you able to easily capture useful data from visitor's to your site? Do you have CiviCRM well integrated on your site to get the data you need for productive reports? The areas what you see gaps go on the wishlist.

Doing this properly is a time commitment and takes some business acumen as well as knowledge of website marketing tactics. It's okay and normal to need some guidance and expert help. More on finding help later.

Let's start with a quick look at the purpose of your website and how it can be a high-performing member of your association's team.

What is the Purpose of Your Website?

Your websites serve a number of purposes for a variety of stakeholders. It can be used to provide information, to sell products, to connect people, and mostly, to connect with your audience. The uniting element behind all of these goals is that your website is a marketing machine for your association. You want your website to support your business goals and bring in revenue, for instance through donations and membership dues. Your website needs to attract potential leads, convert potential leads to customers, boost sales, and connect with your audience.

To create an optimal website that drives engagement, consider the following things:

1. Who is Your Target Audience?

First, figure out who you want your website’s target audience is going to be. You may have multiple personas visiting the site, but let's break it down my percentage. A great idea is to use the 80-20 rule. This is where you would identify the top 20% of users who generally attribute to 80% of your business growth. Knowing who your top users are provides you with a direction on how to create your new design to better cater to this audience. What is their age, gender, employment, financial situation, location, goals and fears. Get into the mindset of your audience.

2. What Parts of Your Site are Most Popular?

The 80-20 rule also applies to the top 20% areas of your website that are being accessed by most of your website visitors. To find this data, you can use tools such as Google Analytics, Lucky Orange and HotJar to study which areas, buttons and pages of your website are being accessed and utilized most. Having this information gives you specific areas to utilize more and which ones to improve.

3. What's Your Competition Doing?

Lastly, check out what similar associations are doing on their website. See what you like and what you don’t, and what will work for your audience. There are tools such as Semrush that can help with comparative research. From your research, decide which features will work best with your target audience and which ones will complement and support your goals.

Your Wishlist is Growing

Understanding the user journey you want for your audience, which pages are most popular, and what fun features are out there, your wishlist should be coming along. Your list can include a design update, new call-to-action buttons, easier navigation, simpler forms and anything else that can improve your users’ experience. Please keep in mind that these wishlist features should support your overall business goals and not things that you just want on the site without a clearly defined purpose.

Budgets and Priorities

Most associations have to be budget conscious and implementing all your wishlist items at once is unrealistic. In our view, it's not even ideal. It is beset to build out your website in stages to test the changes with your audience. It is much easier to redirect your efforts when you make incremental changes than if you launch everything at once. 

We suggest that you divide up your feature wishlist items between high priority items and medium/lower priority items. Start with the highest priority items, those that will really impact your most users and your association's growth, and work through the list as the budget becomes available.

Getting Started

Organize your wishlist with our fun and easy-to-use Website Wishlist Priorities Chart & Worksheet on our site. It will help you reflect on which items are high priority, high impact, and which will bring you the best return on investment. With these priorities clearly defined, you can work with a developer to create a web development roadmap that is within budget and delivers ROI. Visit our site for helpful resources.