Social media has become a powerful tool for nonprofits to engage and interact with their supporters. Organizations are reaching out through Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms to build community, mobilize supporters, and increase their visibility and impact.

In our webinar "The Social Website: Integrating Social Media into Website Design and Function", Debra Askanase explained that social media is the democratization of information. It transforms online readers into publishers by empowering them to post their own information online.

Nonprofits can harness the power of social media to engage supporters on their organizational websites, as well as in the social spaces of the internet.  "The Social Website: Integrating Social Media into Website Design and Function", explored the whys, whats, and hows of integrating social media into nonprofit websites. Presenters Debra Askanase and Seth Giammanco outlined five techniques for doing so:

For organizations looking to replace or overhaul their website, the project ahead may seem enormous, unwieldy, daunting. The path from initial planning to the successful launch of a well designed, functional website is long and full of twists. Trying to accommodate your leaders' feedback, while creating a website that has a unified voice and purpose, can seem nearly impossible.

Fortunately for us, Ryan Ozimek and Tim Forbes have broken down the website development project into 8 clear phases, covered in our recent webinar "What to Expect When You're Expecting: A Website Development Project". Those phases are:

Today, I’m live blogging a few sessions from the 2011 Millennial Donor Summit. This session focuses on how to successfully get started with mobile technology, with Tonia Zampieri from Smart Online presenting.

Flickr Photo: timsnellYou are not your target audience.

It's an old truism that, for one reason or another, we forget to take to heart when it comes to our websites and email. As nonprofit staff, we're passionate about our work; we have to be! But sometimes, we're so intimately involved, we forget to think about how and why others might want to engage with our work.

For John Kenyon, who authored a chapter on this topic in Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission, that's the key to a strong web presence. John will be moderating and speaking at the Online Nonprofit Technology Conference next week. He took a few minutes to chat with me about what it takes to make a great web presence:

We're undergoing some changes here at nten.org. Specifically, we're looking to make our site easier for you and all of our visitors to use. We've been very lucky to grow our site traffic by about 60 to 70% each of the last two years. Since we're a small organization without a lot of marketing dollars to spend -- or, ahem, any -- we need to make sure we're making the most of this traffic.

According to our web site stats, we're not. Our bounce rate is pretty darn high for folks who find our site through search: about 68%. New visitors also bounce at a high rate: about 67%. Our blog, which gives us the most traffic from search, has a bounce rate above 75%.

Friend of NTEN Avinash Kaushik says that organizations should aim for a bounce rate under 50%. We don't expect our new visitor bounce rate will get THAT low, but there's some work we can do to make sure people find MORE great content and stick around our site.

There are two pieces to that puzzle. Part of making our content more compelling has to do with design. But the first thing we need to focus on is the information architecture, or navigation, of our site. The fine folks at Beaconfire are helping us wade through this process. Lots of you helped us with Phase One: The Card Sort.

This week, we moved on to Phase Two: The Wireframe Test. It's a fascinating process that let's you see right away what exactly you're doing wrong. If you've never seen a wireframe test before, here's how we did it (really cheaply!):

Andre didn't win nearly as often when he was overly concerned with looking good.A month into our site overhaul, we haven't even started talking about the graphic design yet -- and that's a good thing. As Andre Agassi learned, image isn't everything; flash without substance doesn't win you 8 Grand Slam titles (and we're all about the big tournaments here at NTEN).

We're going to make sure our site architecture is sound before we worry about making it purty.

The story so far: