Advice notes

Setting up a website

People often approach the Baring Foundation looking for funding to set up a website. These advice notes are based both on the experience of the Foundation in making these grants and on the experience of organisations which have been funded in this way. They are designed to help applicants when they apply for grants and to help organisations once they are supported. They will be useful to organisations that wish to consider setting up a website.

Websites can be enormously helpful to voluntary organisations. It is for this reason that the Baring Foundation is prepared to consider proposals for funding. However, the experience can also be a negative and wasteful one. These advice notes are designed to help.

These are the questions our assessors will ask when reviewing your proposal. They may be helpful for you in making your plans.

1. Thinking about a website

• Why do you want a website?
• Why do you want it now?
• How will it help your organisation achieve its mission?
• Have you written a business case for doing so?
• Is this the best use of your current resources?
• How will the website relate to other information services and products?
• Have you thought about the pros and cons of either having your own address or piggy-backing on someone else's site?

2. Attracting people to your website

• How will you market the new website?
• Which are your target audiences and what is your target number of "hits"?
• What efforts are you intending to make to ensure that your site is linked to relevant sites?

3. Measuring impact

• How will you record who visits the site?
• What level of detail do you need about the visitors?
• What level of detail would you ideally like to have?
• How will you encourage visitors to give you the information you want without taxing their patience?

4. Using a website

• What kind of content do you want to have on the site?
• How will the information be navigated?
• Will you have all your information available to any enquirer or will you want to segment the audiences and direct them to different areas of the site?
• How will you adapt your information for the Internet, taking into account the different expectations and attention spans of web-page readers as compared to, say, readers of newspapers?
• Committed supporters may well plough through huge documents but reproducing your in-house literature and reports directly onto a website is unlikely to engage the casual surfer.

5. What sort of website?

• What level of interactivity do you envisage for the site?
• Should people be able to search it/ ask it questions/ order goods/ become members/ make donations/give you responses?
• If so, what mechanisms do you expect to have and, in the case of financial transactions, what level of security will you offer?

6. Resourcing your website

• What capacity do you currently have and think you'll need, either in-house or through outside contractors, to create, maintain and monitor the site?
• What are your target frequencies for updating the site, target times for responding to queries/orders and so on?
• Do remember that all websites have a significant revenue cost, way above the costs of simply setting one up.
• How will you manage this?

7. Useful contacts

If you feel swamped by all these questions and assume it will all be taken care of by the company/consultant/volunteer offering their time/services, do take some time to check them out with the people concerned. A drab or defunct website is infinitely worse than no website at all. If you want to take the first steps but aren't ready for the commitment of a bespoke website yet, there are halfway houses and free help and advice available. One place to start is www.charitynet.org. Go to Charitynet's Web Roadmap and this will show you a whole range of possibilities for getting started in a small way by getting your organisation listed on free sites and linking yourself to other relevant groups and their information. This site also provides links to other sources of information as do a number of others e.g. the National Council for Voluntary Organisations.

8. Click onto this link to see other sources of funding for developing your website.

Other Baring Foundation advice notes:

• Using consultants
• Quality systems
• IT projects
• Funding for organisational development