Goals
As we plan some updates to shophousingworks.com and housingworks.org i’ve spent a lot of time in the last month thinking about goals.
What do we as a non-profit really want people to do on our website. There are obvious answers such as making a donation, or buying something but is that all? For some people those things arent really options, and it doesnt mean they arent interested in the organization.
Luckly Housing Works, unlike many non-profits, has a lot of ways for people to get involved, you can sign up to volunteer, rsvp to an upcoming event, request a truck to come to your house to pick up furniture, and on and on. There are lots of ways to participate already but I think we can do even more.
I loaded up a new commenting engine called Disq.us today and it really got me thinking about what else we can track. In addition to normal commenting features it has a simple “thumbs up or down” feature which is nice, and hopefully its a step toward people getting more involved in the writing we do. I think to do it really well though you need to change the tone to be more conversational, ask questions. One of my favorite things about tumblr is that it only allows people to comment on a post if the last character is a ? How great is that? it really focuses in on what comments should be, answers ideas, suggestions. They think that you have to give your readers a reason to write something, not just post an empty text box.
The two areas I think we can do more in are advocacy, and events. For events I really want to add an “I’m attending” button to the pages… maybe ours is a little more playful and it says “Count me in”
For advocacy we experimented with the idea of doing a “letter blast” which could be interesting but I’m more interested in twitter adn facebook protests. Asking people to RT messages we post calling out specific @policitians and seeing the word spread.
I think even just a refinement of each of our existing goals and adding these two new ones puts us in a really good place, and hopefully really makes people feel like theres so much more they can do for Housing Works than just giving us their money.
