Charity websites need to get their mission across to be effective. In this article, we lay out how they can achieve this.
Every charity has a mission, but some charity websites are far more effective than others at communicating it. It starts with a clear and concise mission statement that gets across exactly what you’re trying to do. But a great mission statement is just the beginning. To communicate your mission effectively, you should weave it into every aspect of your website, from the design to the information architecture, to leave a lasting impression on your visitors and drive them to act.
Effective mission statements
Your mission statement should be front and centre on your homepage, telling visitors your charity’s goals and how you’ll meet them. Writing a great mission statement is an art, and there’s nothing simple or easy about it. But it should be concise, punchy and written in plain, simple English.
A great example of this is the charity Mercy Chefs’ mission to ‘Just go feed people’. It couldn’t be more concise or to the point.
Not every charity’s mission is quite so clear-cut, of course. The Raspberry Pi Foundation’s mission statement ‘Empowering young people to use computing technologies to shape the world’ is a great example of a mission statement that takes something that could be quite complex and multifaceted, and conveying it with a single sentence.
It can be trickier for charity foundations, who exist to fund other charities, to get their mission across succinctly, but the Scottish charitable foundation The Robinson’s Trust shows it can be done. Their home page mission statement ‘We fund, support, and champion those seeking solutions to poverty and trauma’ manages to convey the many facets of their work in just a dozen words.
A great mission statement should also be really focused, and it should only apply to your organisation. A mission statement like ‘We exist to make the world a better place’ is far too vague. All charities exist to make the world a better place in some form, but your mission statement needs to convey your specific focus. We’d argue that the Ikea Foundation’s vision statement falls into this trap, being too vague to really differentiate them and show specifically what they’re trying to achieve.
When writing your mission statement, you should always have the audience you’re looking to serve in mind. If you’re a charity seeking donations from a broad swathe of the general public, you need to ensure it’s easy for everyone to understand.
If your intended audience is more sector-specific, then by all means speak to them in using the terminology they’ll know, but it’s always best to err on the side of simplicity.
The Wellcome Sanger Institute is a good example of this. Their focus is really complex and scientific, but their mission statement strikes a great balance between simplicity and specificity.
A clear and easy-to-understand mission statement is an essential first step to communicating your mission with your website. However, you can’t rely on a good mission statement alone. To really get it across you should weave your mission into every element of your website.
Aligning your information architecture to your mission
Your site’s information architecture gives structure to all of your content and makes it easier to find for your users. It should always be informed by user needs, but your content groupings can also reflect your mission, baking it into the very fabric of your site.
A great example of this is the Eden Project’s website. The Eden Project is an environmental charity and educational attraction with a mission ‘To demonstrate and inspire positive action for the planet’.
As a major attraction, you might expect Eden’s IA to be like other large, ticketed attractions, with a top-level navigation with sections like ‘Tickets’, ‘What’s on’ or ‘Plan your visit’. Older versions of Eden’s site took this approach, but it wasn’t making it clear that they had a mission outside of attracting visitors. To promote their environmental focus, their website’s IA is now structured around three key elements ‘Visit’, ‘Act’ and ‘Learn’.
‘Visit’ includes everything you need to know about visiting the Eden Project, whereas ‘Act’ includes pages designed to inspire users to make positive changes for the planet, in line with the Eden Project’s mission. ‘Learn’ hosts educational content that makes their environmental mission more accessible to more people. The site’s information architecture shows how a purpose-driven organisation can reflect what it’s trying to achieve in both content and site structure.
Reflect your mission with your design
Although harder to tweak than your mission statement or IA, your website’s design can also play a big part in communicating your mission.
Cancer Research Horizon’s website shows how this can be done. Cancer Research Horizons is an initiative by Cancer Research UK with a mission to ‘Bring together the brightest minds, boldest ideas and best partners to fast-track scientific breakthroughs for patient benefit’.
The website’s design reflects this mission in a few ways. Firstly, the colour palette and style make it feel cutting-edge, and the photography is very laboratory-based, showing the research focus and the strive for scientific breakthroughs. The grid of dots motif used throughout the site comes together in an animation on the homepage to create the strapline ‘further, faster, we are beating cancer’, nodding to the organisation’s mission of bringing minds and ideas together.
All these design choices support the site’s mission and help users to intuitively understand the organisation’s focus without it having to be spelt out.
Summary
Your mission is the heart of your charity. To truly communicate it through your website, you need to weave it into every element - from your site structure to your visual design. A clear, focused mission statement gets you started, but aligning your information architecture and design choices with your goals takes it further. Doing this helps users understand and connect with your cause more deeply, and ultimately means they’re more likely to take action.
For more from our team on how purpose-driven organisations can make their websites more effective, sign up for our upcoming webinar: Big stats and little stories, how to convey your impact online.
