This post was originally published March 19, 2025. It has since been updated to go more in-depth in the process of brand strategy and provide up-to-date examples of the work.

You usually feel the absence of brand strategy before you name it.

Leadership revisits the same foundational questions every few months. Marketing and programs talk about the organization differently. Development tells one story to donors while communications tells another publicly. New hires struggle to explain what makes the organization distinct. Copy gets rewritten again and again because no version ever feels quite right.

Visual identities shift with trends. Messaging shifts depending on who it’s coming from. And slowly, your organization drifts.

Brand strategy is the work that prevents all that. It creates shared clarity about who you are, who you are for and how you are different. It turns what’s implicit explicit so your team is not reinventing the wheel every time you communicate.

In this article, we’ll explore what brand strategy is, the core elements that make it up, how to develop it thoughtfully and how to capture it in practical guidelines your nonprofit or social impact organization can actually use.

Because today more than ever the world needs organizations that operate with clarity and make the world a better place.

Brand strategy defines for your organization who you are, who you’re for, why you matter and what sets you apart.

Alex M.H. Smith defines brand strategy in his book No Bullsh*t Strategy by quoting Dolly Parton and I think it’s an effective definition:

“Know who you are, then do it on purpose.”

Brand strategy is not visual design with intention. It’s not simply setting goals or getting alignment before going into design. And it’s certainly not a set of philosophical perspectives that your organization holds that don’t matter at all for your day-to-day work. It’s the foundation that brings coherence and meaning to all of your work.

Brand strategy identifies an organization’s purpose, strengths, unique approach, work and values and communicates them simply in a way that brings clarity and alignment. It’s a blueprint, a framework, a system. It provides the foundation for your brand, which in turn is the foundation for how your organization shows up in the world.

The result of a good brand strategy is that everybody internally is singing from the same songbook, a beautiful melody in perfect harmony, individually understanding and contributing to that vision. Communicating a clear, consistent and intentional message for audiences externally.

Everyone who offers brand strategy as a service has their own way of defining it (though it should be somewhat consistent). This is how we do it at Briteweb:

These 8 elements are the building blocks that give teams what they need in order to understand what makes their organization their organization (and not another) and then communicate simply and consistently to the rest of the world. 

Let’s look at each individually.

This is a sentence or an expression that captures the essence of your brand. It is the seed out of which everything else grows. It can be (though it’s not always) used as your tagline. A good brand idea is clear, often more evocative than descriptive and as short as possible. 

When we worked with TransLash, this core truth was immediately powerful and clear: they believe that the stories we tell shape our world.

And therefore telling trans stories isn’t just important: it’s life saving. In a time when anti-trans violence and legislation threaten their community—our community, they recognize that sharing authentic stories of trans lives from trans people’s perspectives is vital to building a different world, a world where trans people no longer have to fight to be seen, much less exist. 

This short statement tells the world why we’re here. Why is it that we exist? Why does it matter? A good purpose statement is strategic (it informs your organization’s operations and marketing), inspiring (it attracts and motivates people, whether your employees or your audience) and enduring (it doesn’t change every year, but informs your work for years to come).

Every organization is unique. So what sets you apart, what makes you different, distinctive or even unique, compared to other organizations that are in the same space as you?

“This is the organization that xyz.”

That’s brand positioning. The space in your audience’s that you carve out, the thing that you get known for. Brand positioning finds meaningful differentiation so you can stand out, a place that’s yours and yours alone. A good positioning statement includes who you’re for, what you do for them and what differentiates you from your peers in your audience’s mind (that’s a critical distinction).

Brand pillars further establish what sets your organization apart. These articulate dimensions that make you special, or that you as an organization hold sacred. You should look at them and think “that’s what we’re all about.”

Brand pillars can be the same as your values though they tend to be more meaningful to your audience, where values are most meaningful internally.

What is your organization’s origin story? What problems do you exist to solve? Why were you founded? What is the monster or the villain you were created to defeat? What is your vision for the world you are working to achieve? Your brand narrative is a rallying cry for your organization.

You want to figure out very clearly who you’re for. Social impact organizations often strive to be for anybody who cares, or anybody they can reach. After all, their work makes the world a better place.

But the reality is if you’re for everyone, you’re for no one. And the opposite is also true: when you narrow your focus and try to reach someone specific, you’ll reach more people. There is universality in specificity. Audience profiles help define who you want to reach by looking at meaningful drivers.

There’s a quote that our team at Briteweb loves:

“People don’t always remember what you say or even what you do, but they always remember how you made them feel.” — Maya Angelou

What you say, that’s your messaging (which we get to next). But how you make them feel, that’s the domain of brand personality. What are the specific traits and dimensions, the ingredients that articulate how you show up in the world and how you make people feel?

Notice you end with your messaging. You don’t start there. Everything else that comes before informs what it is you say and to whom in what contexts.

Brand strategy is both creative and logical work. It is a process that pulls truths about your organization (and about the world) up to the surface and captures them in a usable blueprint. Here is how we go about doing that.

The first step in the process of developing a brand strategy is to set goals. First of all, you want to be clear on what your organization is working to do. But you also want to be clear about what your current brand is lacking and therefore what your new brand needs to be able to do (and that will start with brand strategy).

Once you’ve set your goals, you dive into desk research. There’s a lot of research you could do here, but ultimately the goal is to have a comprehensive, clear understanding of the landscape. That includes your organization, your peers and your audience.

Desk research is super important. But what’s critical and irreplaceable is getting out there and talking to people. Talk to leadership, talk to frontline staff, talk to the development team, talk to the call centre team, talk to the board, talk to the newest hire, talk to the person who’s been there the longest, talk to the people your organization serves and talk to donors. Talk to as many people as you can and hear about their perspectives, listen to their stories. You can run focus groups to hear from several people at one and supplement interviews with surveys.

Where does your brand currently show up? What are the assets that are out there right now? What are the processes you have at your organization to facilitate people using your brand? This will provide you with a list of the assets you’ll need to create along with a checklist for your brand rollout.

Workshops are the bread and butter of brand strategy work. They’re such a useful tool to having a group of thoughtful, informed people think through various aspects of the organization. They can be useful in surfacing differences of opinion, tensions and misalignment in a productive and safe manner but also in realizing alignment.

However, workshops are not where the brand strategy gets created. They’re a mechanism for surfacing insights, seeing different ideas collide and identifying the tensions that exist within the organization.

Similarly, all of these activities are designed to surface the insights and ideas from which you craft the brand strategy. A good brand strategy brings powerful truths out of the depths and into light. Indeed, the whole process is about uncovering those truths, the things that are unsaid, implied or that lie between the lines. Sometimes it’s that offhand remark that’s dropped right before you sign off at the end of an interview or said half-jokingly in a workshop that holds the key. The job of a brand strategist is to create a space for those truths to emerge, and then to listen intently to everything that’s said.

Creating your brand strategy is just the beginning. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a lot of work. But all of that work is only as useful as it gets used moving forward. That’s what brand guidelines are for.

You need your brand strategy to be practical and usable by your team. Not locking them into rigid structures, but equipping them with dynamic ingredients they can use to show up consistently in different contexts.

Further reading: Brand Rollout: A Guide to Launching Your New Brand

When your brand strategy is working, the difference is tangible.

Your organization can describe itself clearly and consistently. Teams are aligned around a shared understanding of purpose, positioning and personality. Messaging is not invented from scratch each time because it is grounded in agreed foundations. Design decisions are connected to strategy instead of personal preference.

Good brand strategy reflects what is already true about your organization. It surfaces strengths, tensions and motivations that may have been felt but never clearly articulated.

But it does more than reflect. Brand strategy also directs.

Once you are clear on who you are, you also become clear on what you need to stop doing. You stop trying to be for everyone. You stop pursuing ideas that dilute your focus. You make intentional choices about where to invest time, energy and attention. That focus compounds across fundraising, partnerships, hiring and communications because everything is rooted in the same core understanding.

Brand strategy is not a one-time exercise. It is a living framework that shapes decisions, sharpens priorities and guides how you show up every day.

So that you can know who you are and do it on purpose.

Join us for a free workshop where we’ll walk through how to develop these essential elements of your brand. In this session, you’ll learn: 

Save your seat below and we’ll email you when we announce the date.

What is brand strategy?

Brand strategy defines your organization’s purpose, positioning, audience, personality and messaging so you can communicate clearly and consistently. It provides the foundation for how your organization shows up and differentiates itself.

Why is brand strategy important?

Brand strategy reduces internal friction and prevents drift. It creates shared clarity about who you are, who you are for and how you are different so teams are not reinventing the wheel every time they communicate or make decisions.

What are the elements of brand strategy?

At Briteweb, brand strategy includes eight core elements: brand idea, brand purpose, brand positioning, brand pillars or values, brand narrative, audience profiles, brand personality and brand messaging. Together, these elements form a practical framework for consistent communication.

How do you develop a brand strategy?

Developing a brand strategy typically includes setting goals, conducting research, interviewing stakeholders, auditing existing assets and facilitating workshops to surface insights. The goal is to uncover and articulate the truths that define your organization so they can guide future decisions.

How long does brand strategy take?

For most organizations, a comprehensive brand strategy process takes 8 to 12 weeks. Smaller organizations with fewer stakeholders or simpler structures can sometimes move faster, while larger or more complex organizations may require additional time.

What is the difference between brand strategy and visual identity?

Brand strategy defines who you are, who you are for and how you are different. Visual identity expresses that strategy through design elements like logos, colour palettes and typography. Strategy comes first and ensures design decisions are rooted in clarity rather than personal preference or trends.

Oh, AI. You sure have disrupted the world. We were all settling nicely into our digital ecosystems and you had to come in and throw a wrench into all of our best laid plans.

For anybody who is managing content on a website, the question of AI has become nothing short of an existential one. Right after, “To be or not to be” and “cogito ergo sum.” As LLMs have become part of our everyday lives (for better or for worse) and a key method for us to look up information that we didn’t know before, there are two big questions we have to answer:

So while question 1 is still being answered (I looked at the difference between organic in 2024 and in 2025 across 40 analytics accounts, and the results were surprising), a couple months ago, Bing Webmaster Tools introduced a new report that helps answer question 2 by showing how Bing-powered AI answers use your content.

Let’s look at it.

For anybody who might be unfamiliar, Bing Webmaster Tools is the Microsoft equivalent of Google Search Console.

It’s a tool that provides insights on how (in this case) Microsoft Bing sees, understands and ranks the content on your website. While Google makes up a vast majority of search traffic, Bing does provide some interesting information on how your content is performing.

But to be honest, it wasn’t until they released this new report that I actually started using it.

The AI Report shows how Bing-powered AI experiences (Bing Search, Copilot, etc.) cite your content when people make searches that LLMs answer. What do I mean by “cite your content?”

Let’s back up for a moment. When you ask an AI tool a question that they need to look up on the internet to answer, they don’t just respond to your question directly. What they do is they break it apart into a bunch of smaller, specific questions. This is known as a fan-out. They then turn those fragments into searches that they run. These are called grounding queries. In this case, they retrieve information from Bing’s index and use that information to generate a response tailored to your question.

When your content is shown as a source alongside that answer, that is a citation.

Let’s use a hypothetical example to illustrate how an LLM will turn a question into a fan-out and grounding queries. For example, somebody who might search: “What are some specific things I can actually do in my daily life to help fight climate change?”

This is a fairly broad question. Here are example fan-outs the system might fragment that question into:

From there, it will search the following (example) grounding queries:

One of the reasons I find the Bing AI report useful is it’s actually quite informative of the type of content it cites. For example, one of the immediate reactions to AI content exploding on the scene was that content marketers were going to have to create less “grass is green” kind of content. Less bog standard content that could appear on any website. The sector direction was to make your content more unique by being specific to your experience. And this is great advice (it was even before LLMs came on the scene) but what we’re currently finding is that the content that’s getting cited the most is simple instructional content: how to write proper heading tags, how to set up GA4, etc.

These are posts we initially wrote because they were helpful to specific clients but we stopped writing a couple years ago in favour of more unique, experience-based content.

The other benefit of referencing Bing’s AI report is that yes it can give you insights for what kind of content to create, but also it helps guide how to further optimize content that’s not doing well. If you’re tracking these citations regularly, you’ll also be able to tell if certain content starts performing better or worse, which will allow you to react and further optimize a page that might be going down in times cited.

There are two key dimensions you can look at: grounding queries and cited pages.

The AI Report does not show the actual user questions that lead to citations.You only see the grounding queries the LLM generates.

It’s also currently not showing if you’re getting any clicks to your content, only if it’s been cited and how often (very similar to an impressions report in Google Search Console).

Finally, it doesn’t show you what other sites are getting cited for those grounding queries. So if you start losing rankings, you can see if another site’s page has overtaken you, and which means you can’t analyze why the AI might be favouring that content over yours. Which means you can’t use that information to optimize your page the way you can with traditional rankings.

Microsoft Bing Webmaster’s AI Report is a first step to giving us a little more insight about how LLMs are using our content to answer users’ questions. It’s valuable that it gives us “first party data” from the actual tool rather than a third party tool that’s going to run a bunch of searches to see if your site shows up.

This information is useful for creating and optimizing your content, but I think the real value is how helps us better understand how AI works.

Do you find yourself asking, “What’s the point of our website, anyway?” You’re not alone.

A lot of nonprofit websites are treated like digital brochures: places to store information, explain programs and prove the organization exists.

But if that’s all your website does, it’s probably underperforming.

There’s a lot that goes into making that kind of website. Here are 12 principles we apply when we build our clients’ websites.

Before we dive in, let’s zoom because there are four key things every nonprofit website should accomplish.

Before you evaluate design, copy, SEO or performance, start with purpose. A nonprofit website should help people:

Your website not a junk drawer; it’s a place that should help people do something.

These four jobs create the foundation for every decision that follows, from navigation and page structure to content, accessibility and analytics. The best practices below are not separate tactics. They are the pieces that help those four jobs happen.

Most nonprofit websites don’t fall apart all at once. They drift. New pages are added without a clear structure. Programs change but navigation stays the same. Copy gets rewritten until it becomes stale, disconnected. Tools and plugins are added to solve immediate problems.

Over time, the website becomes harder to manage, harder to understand and less connected to the organization it represents.

That doesn’t always mean everything needs to be rebuilt. But it always means that you need to evaluate your website as a system, not a collection of pages.

Your brand is the story of how your organization is uniting people to transform the world. You should express it consistently across every channel, from social media to your real-world location to, yes, your website.

It’s conveyed through your logo, colours, fonts, photography and copy.

But it’s much more than that. It shapes the ideas you share and how you share them, the way you organize information and the feelings people get when they engage with you.

Strong brands build trust. Clear messaging, consistent visuals and thoughtful storytelling signal credibility and help people feel confident engaging with your organization.

Your website is just one of many touchpoints your audience has with your brand. The branding work needs to come first. If you’re not sure where to start, when website problems are actually brand problems is a good place.

I want to talk about the word “users” first.

It’s a common term in design and technology circles. User-centred design is all about putting yourself in your audience’s shoes to create the best possible experience for them. But the word actually backfires. It creates distance by reducing people to their relationship to the website.

We’re creating for people. Real people trying to accomplish something meaningful. Thinking about them that way encourages empathy and helps teams build better websites.

A website is a tool that somebody uses to do something specific. Good websites make it easy for them to do that. Everything that gets in their way creates friction and needs to go. That’s the most fundamental principle of a website.

If you can obsess about your audience, learn what they want, understand what’s getting in their way and keep improving their experience, your website will keep getting better.

Good design puts people first. But it can do much more than help them meet their needs. It can turn a usable experience into a powerful one that connects with people profoundly.

Think about a government site. Intentionally designed with no frills, meant to get out of people’s way so they can complete tasks quickly. But as a visitor, you still can’t help thinking “get me out of here.”

Government websites are the airports of the internet. Someone may have designed them for efficiency, but they forgot to make an experience worth having.

Great design doesn’t just make a website attractive. It guides people through the experience. Clear navigation, visual hierarchy and thoughtful layout help people understand what matters most and where to go next. When design is done well, people move naturally toward the actions that matter most.

Modern websites also need to work beautifully across every screen size. Designing for mobile first helps teams prioritize what matters most and keeps the experience clear and usable on smaller devices.

“People don’t read anymore.”

I hear this a lot and it couldn’t be further from the truth.

We read more than ever. What we don’t have time for is mediocre content. Your organization is full of ideas worth sharing, ideas that can change the world. So don’t shy away from words, but use them well.

Your challenge is to write copy so good you dare your reader to look away.

Take the space you need to give your reader real value. No more, no less. Whether that’s 200 words or 2,000, a single paragraph or twenty, the measure isn’t length. It’s whether every sentence earns its place.

Strong copy also builds trust. When writing is clear, helpful and direct, people feel more confident in your organization and more willing to engage.

Further reading: Writing for the Web: Best Practices for Nonprofit Organizations

Much of the internet, like much of the world, isn’t built in ways that are inclusive or accessible for all audiences.

Accessibility means making sure everyone can use your site, whether they live with a disability, have low internet connectivity, or aren’t native speakers. It’s about removing barriers and making your website more usable and your content easier to understand.

But here’s the other cool thing about accessibility: it’s better for everyone.

Adding closed captions to videos doesn’t just benefit people who are hard of hearing. It also helps the parent watching a video while putting their baby to sleep. Writing alt text to your images doesn’t just help people using screen readers. It also helps people whose connection is too slow to load images. Making sure your text has enough contrast with its background isn’t only good for people like me who forget to wear their glasses. It helps those who might be looking at their phones on a bright sunny day.

Creating an accessible world centres people we’ve traditionally excluded from our work, and ultimately creates a better world for all of us.

Further reading: Accessible Web Design for Nonprofits

Every website gathers information from its visitors.

Most organizations will never directly use that data. But companies like Google, Meta, Amazon and Apple collect data from visitors, and one of the ways they do that is through tools that run on our websites.

That means we have a responsibility to our audience: disclose what information we collect, how we collect it, and what we use it for. Most importantly, people must be able to choose whether they want to share that information.

This is called consent management, and it’s a critical part of running a website today.

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is how you help people find you when they’re searching for answers on Google or other search engines. Answer engine optimization (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) help people find what they’re looking for on AI platforms (from Alexa and Siri to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini…)

On the other end of each of these platforms are people who are looking for answers. Answers you can provide.

Search is changing, but the basic job is still the same: you need to understand what people are asking so you can publish useful, clear answers. It’s all about putting people first.

For nonprofits, that means creating the best possible content to answer the real questions your audiences, donors, partners and communities are already asking.

A blog or insights section is the most effective way to do this and grow an audience over time.

Further reading: SEO Beyond Keywords

Unfortunately, we live in a world where you have to protect yourself from actors who try to take websites down just because they can. With AI coming on the scene, we’ve seen cyber attacks increase, and no organization is too small to be a target.

But it’s not just your organization at risk. It’s your audience too.

If you accept donations or collect personal information, you have a responsibility to make sure people can browse safely.

The two best ways to do this are research and maintenance. Keeping software up to date, monitoring for breaking changes, and avoiding tools that are no longer maintained all help protect your website. Research plugins carefully too. Poorly maintained ones can introduce malware or create vulnerabilities that put visitor data at risk.

The people who publish content on your site are also users with real needs.

I’ve worked with too many nonprofits where publishing a blog post meant manually linking it in a dozen places across the site. There was a shared document listing every location, thumbnail dimensions and headline character counts. Updating the site took half a day, work that could have been automated with one click.

The backend should make it easy to publish, connect and update content. A site that’s hard to update is a site that stagnates.

One of the best things about websites is that they’re dynamic. I often tell clients: you’re not printing thousands of copy that you have to recall when you find a typo. If something’s not working, you can change it.

In fact, there is always something to improve on your website.

So how do you know what’s working and what’s not? By measuring.

Every website should use analytics tools to understand how people are interacting with the things we have designed for them:

These insights are invaluable and you look for them to continuously improve the experience you’re providing.

Setting up GA4 is quick. Check our guide to setting up GA4.

Your website is a tool people use to accomplish something. That tool needs to perform. Maintenance is one key way to make sure it continues to work as it’s intended. Things change all the time on the internet and code gets depecrated.

Load time is another important factor, one that you’ll have more control over if you’re not a developer. Choose good hosting, set up proper caching, and upload images in the right size and format (when we design, we include a performance budget to lighten the load of every page).

Research shows that if people wait more than one second for a page to load, they’re 33% more likely to leave.

All that thoughtful design and carefully written copy won’t matter if nobody sees it.

Everything here will help make your website more successful, but it’s not all or nothing.

Weak copy doesn’t make your site useless. A design you don’t love doesn’t mean you should hide it. Limited capacity for SEO right now doesn’t mean the whole website is a failure.

Every organization should start with a clear website strategy. What’s the purpose of your website? Who’s it for? What problems does it solve for your audience and for your organization? How will you know if it’s working?

A strong strategy helps you focus on what matters most and tune out the noise. It connects all the principles in this article, helps you decide what to prioritize, and turns this list from overwhelming into actionable.

Your website can invite people to join you in making a difference. It can multiply your reach and amplify your impact.

Or it can sit quietly online, like a brochure in a doctor’s office.

When your website isn’t working, a redesign seems like the obvious fix. After all, that’s how you solve navigation, layout, messaging and design issues.

Sometimes that’s exactly right. 

But sometimes, those website problems can be symptoms of something deeper: unclear positioning, undefined audiences, muddy messaging or a dated visual identity.

These are brand problems. And while a website redesign can absolutely improve them, it helps to know what you’re actually dealing with before you choose your approach.

We see this pattern regularly. An organization comes to us for a website redesign, and as we dig into the work together, we realize the real issues are brand issues. That doesn’t mean we stop and start over. It means we widen the lens.

When we partnered with Restore Justice Foundation, their website was full of legal explainers. Useful and valuable, but they didn’t convey the human side of the work, that everything Restore Justice does is about helping people whose lives have been destroyed by a harsh, punitive justice system. The relationship between Restore Justice Foundation and its sister organization Restore Justice Illinois also created confusion. And the visual identity didn’t match the boldness of their vision or the heart of their work.

We didn’t start with a full rebrand. We built on their existing brand guidelines and evolved them through the website project: a brighter colour palette, bolder typography, emotive storytelling and photography that put their community at the centre. The result was a website that felt true to who they are and a stronger brand expression that they now use across all their channels.

So if your budget or timeline only allows for one project, a website redesign is a perfectly good place to start. You can make real, meaningful progress on brand problems through that process.

But it helps to go in with your eyes open. When you know the root cause is brand, you can make smarter decisions about scope, prioritize the right conversations and build a website that addresses the right problems.

So how do you know if you’re dealing with a brand problem or a website problem? Here are the most common pain points we see and how to tell the difference.

The structure of your website plays a huge role in helping people navigate and find what they need. No argument there. 

But structure depends on clarity. If as an organization, you can’t label your programs consistently, the navigation will always feel not quite right. If your services overlap conceptually, over time, the sitemap will too. If internal teams describe things differently, the copy on your website will start to reflect that confusion.

A website redesign can improve the architecture significantly. But if the underlying lack of clarity isn’t addressed, those structural problems tend to resurface.

Sometimes the problem really is that your website was built a decade ago and it shows. A website redesign will solve for that.

But if your brand looks just as dated as your website, then the website might not be the problem. 

We see this a lot and there are a few options.

One is to thoughtfully evolve and expand your existing brand through the website redesign. Just like we did with Restore Justice, building on their existing guidelines to create a stronger visual expression without starting from scratch.

Another is to treat the moment as an opportunity to redefine the brand more fully. Rather than building incrementally on what exists, you start a new chapter with a verbal and visual identity that brings deeper clarity to who you are. That new brand foundation then informs and strengthens the website.

We started our work with TransLash with just the website. But in our research and insights workshop, deeper questions kept resurfacing around their visual and verbal storytelling. It became clear we needed to settle these foundational pieces and start by clarifying their brand. And so we did and that work elevated everything that came after.

Every project is unique and there isn’t one solution. Only if you expand your brand through the website redesign, make sure you consider your broader ecosystem. Your website doesn’t exist in isolation. If the redesign moves your brand forward, you’ll need a plan to bring all of your channels together so you’re telling the same story everywhere. 

Every good website redesign makes complexity easier to understand through structure, visual design and messaging.

Having your brand messaging sorted before you start doesn’t mean the website writes itself. 

But it means you’re building from a strong foundation rather than figuring it out as you go. With that clarity in place, it becomes easier to stay consistent across channels, to make sure the way you talk about your work matches the way you show it visually and to help your audience understand what you do in a structured way rather than just on one page of your website.

If you’re working on messaging within the website project, just make sure you’re investing the time to get it right and identify how it fits within your existing brand.

Organizations in social impact almost always have multiple audiences: donors, participants, partners, policymakers, volunteers, parents, researchers, advocacy groups… This tension is real, because when you try to speak to everyone equally, you speak to nobody. And conversely, the more targeted you are, the more universal your message becomes.

A big part of the website process is building different audience journeys and weaving them together. 

But brand is where you define who matters most. Not who might be interested, but who you exist to serve, who is ready to move to action and who will carry your mission forward. Brand also helps you decide who you’re not prioritizing, which is just as important for making clear strategic choices.

You can do some of that audience work within a website project. We usually do. But the clearer you are on this going in, the more it allows you to focus your website redesign on the user journeys, from information architecture to homepage messaging to calls to action.

This one’s tricky. Sometimes the misalignment is small enough that a website redesign can resolve it. Helping people choose a direction together, after all, is part of the process.

Other times, the disagreement runs deeper. If the key voices at your organization don’t agree on how you should show up in the world, it’s a gamble to expect a website project to find the magical thread.

What’s often needed is space for people to talk, share their perspectives, listen to each other and have someone guide them toward a path they can all support. Not necessarily agree on, but choose to get behind.

And that is something the brand process excels at.

When we work with organizations on both brand and website, we typically recommend starting with brand. Not because the website can’t address brand problems, but because the two projects answer different questions in a natural sequence.

Brand answers the foundational questions. Why does your organization exist? What do you do and for whom? How do you talk about your work? What do you look and sound like when you show up in the world? These are the questions that shape everything else: your messaging, your visual identity, your voice, your positioning relative to peers.

The website then becomes an expression of those answers. It’s where you structure your story across pages and sections, adapt your visual identity to different content types, build audience journeys and create a consistent experience from the first click to the last. It’s a critical channel, probably your most important one. But it’s a channel, not the source.

When brand comes first, the website project moves faster because the big strategic decisions have already been made. The team isn’t debating positioning and page layouts at the same time. The design has a foundation to build on rather than inventing one. And the result tends to last longer because it’s rooted in something intentional rather than something improvised along the way.

A website redesign can improve how users find what they need, modernize your look and feel, clarify what you do, prioritize audiences and help key voices align. We’ve seen it do all of these things.

The question is whether a redesign will solve the problem or temporarily improve it. If the root causes are brand problems, a website can make things better, sometimes a lot better, but it won’t make the underlying issue go away.

And you’ll feel it. The navigation you just put a lot of thought into will start feeling fuzzy. The website will encourage new visual styles rather than establishing a consistent one. Your messaging will stretch rather than focus. Every department will want their audience represented on the homepage or in the nav. Decisions you thought leaders had agreed on will get revisited the moment a new priority surfaces.

So how do you tell the difference?

Zoom out. 

Your website is a massive channel, but look at the rest of your assets. Are the problems you’re facing unique to your website? Or do they follow you everywhere, on your social media, your external communications, your internal conversations?

If the problems are website-specific and your team talks about your organization consistently, go ahead with the redesign.

If the problems are systemic, then you’ve got a brand challenge. And the good news is that both are solvable. Sometimes a dedicated brand project is the right starting point. Sometimes addressing brand within a website redesign is the smartest move given your budget and timeline. The important thing is that you know what you’re solving for, so you can choose the right approach and set realistic expectations for the outcome.

Accessibility is an ongoing discipline. New considerations emerge, technologies evolve, and our understanding deepens over time. That applies to nonprofits, purpose-driven organizations, and to us at Briteweb as well.

I wouldn’t call myself an expert; accessibility work is too nuanced and too human for that kind of finality. But I am committed to learning continuously, a mindset that is essential if we want to create high-calibre digital experiences that work for everybody. 

With that in mind, I’ve put together this practical guide for purpose-driven organizations, designed to help teams self-audit, reflect, and identify opportunities to grow their accessibility practice in a consistent and meaningful way.

One of the most persistent myths is that accessibility is something you can retroactively add on at the end of a web project; a series of boxes to check, so to speak.

In reality, it should be foundational to the entire process. If accessibility is treated like a final checklist item, you’ve already missed the mark. Good design is accessible design, and vice versa; it shouldn’t hinder your ability to create something great.

Another common misconception is that automated tools catch most accessibility problems. While tools are helpful, they typically only catch around 30% of issues. Structural problems, content clarity, and real usability challenges can often fly under the radar of these tools (Source: Easy A11y Guide). We’re also finding that some AI tools are introducing new accessibility problems just as quickly as they promise to solve others.

There’s also a common belief that accessibility is expensive. Retrofitting a site after launch can absolutely be costly, but building with accessibility in mind from the start is usually a marginal, and worthwhile, investment rather than a massive one. Accessibility debt is real technical debt. When it’s ignored, it compounds over time, becoming more complex and more expensive to address later.

And perhaps most importantly, accessibility means more than meeting compliance standards. For purpose-driven organizations in particular, it speaks volumes about values alignment. If your goal as an organization is to be inclusive and serve all of your audiences, your digital spaces should reflect that ethos.

Accessibility is rooted in the belief that everyone, regardless of ability, should be able to access the websites, tools, and technologies that fuel the web, and our world. The whole point is to create inclusive experiences for everyone.

Accessible design supports:

It also supports users on older devices, people experiencing stress or cognitive overload, and even future developers maintaining your site.

Next time you’re trying to navigate to a website that won’t load high-resolution images on a spotty 3G network, you’ll see how much the average person benefits from accessibility.

Bonus: Accessibility is great for SEO! If you structure your content in a way that is useful for human eyes, it also helps search engines and LLMs find your content more easily.

I recommend starting with simple but revealing questions, and actually testing them yourself:

Put your mouse away and use the Tab key to move through links, buttons, and form fields. You should be able to see a clear focus state as you move. If you get stuck, skip content, or lose track of where you are, that’s a signal something needs attention.

Use a screen reader and tab through your forms. Are labels announced clearly? Do instructions come before the fields they relate to? If the experience only works visually, it likely needs structural improvements.

Turn one on and try it. On a Mac, you can enable VoiceOver with Command + F5 or by going to Settings > Accessibility > VoiceOver. On other devices, similar settings live under Accessibility. Navigate your homepage and key pages. Are headings announced in the correct order? Are links descriptive, or do you hear “click here” repeatedly?

You can disable JavaScript in your browser settings or temporarily turn it off in your browser’s developer tools. With it disabled, does your navigation still work? Can you access key content? While many modern sites rely on JavaScript, core information and functionality should not completely disappear without it.

In your browser’s web inspector (DevTools), you can simulate network throttling to test slower speeds. There are also third-party tools that simulate low bandwidth environments. Better yet, test your site in a real low-speed setting. Does it load quickly enough to be usable? Do essential elements appear first?

If accessibility only comes up after launch or when something breaks, it’s likely being treated as a checklist item instead of a foundation. Ongoing conversation is a clear indicator of long-term commitment.

If these questions are difficult for you or anyone in your organization to answer, that might be your sign it’s time for a closer look. Accessibility often fails quietly, until someone can’t complete a donation, sign up for a program, or access critical information.

There are some impactful accessibility improvements that are also surprisingly simple.

Using descriptive link text like “Read our 2024 Impact Report” instead of “Click here” gives context to screen reader users and improves clarity for all users. Links should make sense on their own, helping people understand exactly where they’re navigating to.

Headings should follow a logical structure (H1 → H2 → H3) to create a meaningful outline of the page, not just visual styling. Screen readers rely on this hierarchy to help users navigate quickly and understand how content is organized.

This one is more for developers. Native <button> elements come with built-in keyboard functionality, focus states, and screen reader support. Styling a <div> to act like a button requires extra code and is easy to get wrong, often creating unnecessary accessibility barriers.

This is both a design and development consideration. Buttons and links should be large enough and spaced far enough apart to prevent accidental taps. Placing interactive elements too close together creates friction, especially on mobile.

WCAG 2.5.5 (AAA) recommends a minimum target size of 44×44 pixels, aligning with both Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines and Google’s Material Design standards.

It’s also important to note that visual size and interactive area do not need to match. A small icon can remain visually compact while its clickable area is padded to meet accessibility standards. This allows teams to maintain visual clarity without sacrificing usability.

None of these are flashy or overcomplicated, but they all make a difference.

I prioritize areas that are both foundational and mission-critical, and I focus on improvements or fixes that don’t necessarily require a full development overhaul right away. That said, I caution against relying on bandaid fixes.

If someone can’t donate, register, apply, or sign up, that’s not just an accessibility issue; it’s a mission issue.

Ensure that:

These can often be improved through thoughtful content and configuration rather than heavy development. These flows directly impact community access and support, so they’re a high-impact place to start.

Clear heading structure, logical content order, and meaningful labels create the foundation of an accessible site.

Much of this can be addressed in your CMS by organizing headings properly, avoiding skipped levels, and structuring content intentionally rather than visually.

If your content structure is sound, assistive technologies can interpret it correctly.

Testing your site using only a keyboard is one of the fastest ways to uncover structural problems.

Can you tab through links in a logical order? Can you activate buttons and complete key actions without a mouse? While deeper fixes may require development, simply auditing and documenting gaps is a low-barrier starting point.

Slow sites are inaccessible sites. Large images, unnecessary scripts, and bloated pages disproportionately impact users on older devices, slower networks, or limited data plans (think rural areas).

Performance improvements such as compressing images and limiting auto-play media can immediately improve usability.

Writing meaningful alt text for images is one of the most straightforward accessibility improvements a content team can make. Describing the purpose of an image (not just what it shows) ensures that screen reader users receive the same contextual information as sighted users.

Disclaimer: Avoid relying on small fixes for a prolonged period of time. While these elements are important, they’re not a replacement for a complete accessibility audit.

The conversation is shifting. We’re moving from a basic level of awareness (“Accessibility matters”) to actual implementation (“How do we actually do this, and do this well?”). There is still a long way to go, but it’s promising to see that we’re moving in the right direction.

There’s also growing recognition that accessibility, performance, and sustainability are not separate conversations. They’re interconnected parts of responsible digital practice.

For organizations working to fight climate change, improve access to education, advocate for equality, or protect human rights, the work is fundamentally about dignity. It’s about expanding access, shifting power, and caring for people in meaningful ways.

So it’s worth asking: shouldn’t the digital spaces these missions occupy reflect those same values?

If we believe in justice, inclusion, and equity in the real world, our websites should embody those principles, too. Accessibility goes beyond a technical add-on; at its core, it’s about care. It’s about making sure people can participate fully, whether they’re donating, learning, applying, reading, or simply trying to understand your work.

That’s where the work gets interesting.

Because accessibility isn’t separate from your mission. It’s an extension of it.

This article was modified on May 6, 2026 to update the release date.

A new version of WordPress is scheduled to be released this year, and if your website runs on WordPress, you may be wondering what that means for you.

In this article, I’m going to share what to expect with WordPress 7.0 and how you can prepare without creating unnecessary risk for your team or your website.

WordPress originally planned to release 7.0 on April 9, 2026, but on March 31 they delayed the release. The current expected release date is May 20, 2026.

However, major WordPress releases don’t all arrive at once. They move through a public process of beta releases, release candidates, testing, and bug fixing before the final version ships. That process is already underway for WordPress 7.0, which means developers, plugin and theme teams, and site owners already have early versions they can test in staging environments before launch.

We’re going to talk a little bit more about the process leading up to the WordPress update, but the short version is: don’t rush to update on day one, and don’t do it on your live site.

How long you should wait isn’t really a set number of weeks. It depends on your specific setup.

The reason is, your WordPress site isn’t just WordPress. It’s WordPress plus your theme (or theme framework, like Divi or Elementor), plus every plugin you’re running. All of those pieces need to work with WordPress 7 before you make the switch.

Here are the steps we recommend for making the switch to WordPress 7.

For someone running all premium, actively maintained tools, this whole process might take a couple weeks. If you’ve got niche or older plugins in the mix, it could take longer, and that’s actually a signal that those plugins may need replacing.

If you do update and something breaks (either a plugin or your theme), there’s unfortunately nothing you can do other than wait for the developers of that plugin or theme to fix their product, or switch to a different plugin. That’s why we test on staging first.

Note: One more thing to be aware of: WordPress 7.0 is raising the minimum PHP version to 7.4 (up from 7.2). If your site is running PHP 7.2 or 7.3, you won’t even be able to update to WordPress 7.0. Check with your hosting provider to confirm what PHP version you’re on, and if you need to upgrade, do that before attempting the WordPress update. For the best performance and security, the WordPress core team recommends PHP 8.3 or higher.

WordPress 7.0 is a big release. It marks the start of Phase 3 of the Gutenberg project, which is all about collaboration and workflows. The idea is to move WordPress from a single-author editing tool to something more like a collaborative platform where teams can work together.

There are a few things you can and should do right now to get ready:

The good news is WordPress isn’t going to surprise everyone and release the new version. Leading up to the rollout, there will be pre-releases: Beta 1 is planned for February 19, 2026, and Release Candidate 1 is expected around March 19, 2026. This will enable the community to plan their updates in advance.

We’ll also be testing those pre-releases and we will share information about what to expect as we learn more.

Naturally, the question is do you have to make that switch or can you stay on WordPress 6.0? You can, technically, for a while. But it’s not a good long-term plan.

WordPress’s official position is that only the latest major release is fully supported. Previous major releases may or may not receive security patches as serious vulnerabilities come up, but there’s no guarantee and no fixed timeline for those.

WordPress has historically backported security fixes to older versions as a courtesy, but that courtesy is shrinking. In 2022, they dropped security support for versions 3.7 through 4.0. In July 2025, they dropped versions 4.1 through 4.6. The pattern is clear: older versions eventually stop receiving any security updates at all. Every new major release adds to the maintenance burden of supporting old branches, which makes it more likely that your version gets cut off.

Beyond security, plugins will also stop supporting past versions of WordPress as they update their code to work with the new version. Over time, you’ll find fewer and fewer plugins that are compatible with your older version, and the ones that are may have their own unpatched vulnerabilities.

By not making the update, you open yourself up to risks that could be far more costly than the update itself.

WordPress is an actively maintained platform that makes regular updates and improvements. The current version is WordPress 6.9, released in December 2025. Between major versions, there are smaller updates that get rolled out (6.7, 6.8, 6.9, etc.). Where major updates typically introduce new features, architectural changes, and user-facing improvements, minor updates are smaller and focus on bug fixes and security patches.

WordPress 6.9 focused on laying the groundwork for collaboration features. It introduced a new Notes system for block-level commenting, improvements to the Command Palette for faster dashboard navigation, and the early foundations for AI integration through the Abilities API.

One of the strengths of WordPress is it’s an open source ecosystem with an active community contributing to it through plugins and themes. Unfortunately, that means that during large updates, WordPress’s code changes might cause those plugins and themes to no longer work until they get updated.

That means that key functionality on your website (for plugins) or even your site itself could break when you update to the new version.

WordPress releases updates on a regular basis; this is a big part of how it remains one of the most used CMSs today. These updates are designed to help you future proof your website. With the right planning, thoughtful testing, and a bit of preparation, you can make sure your move to WordPress 7.0 is a smooth and manageable transition.

A little work now will go a long way to keeping your website secure, stable, and ready for what’s next.

Doing good work isn’t always enough.

Many social impact organizations are deeply invested in their missions. They’re running meaningful programs, responding to urgent needs, and working hard to create lasting impact. 

And yet, there’s a quiet frustration we hear often: the work isn’t landing the way it should.

People don’t fully understand what you do. Your website feels outdated or incomplete. Your messaging shifts depending on who’s telling the story. And internally, your team spends a lot of time explaining, clarifying, and re-creating things that should feel easier.

And now more than ever, organizations working for good are up against powerful forces pushing back against our shared values and our vision for the future. 

If any of this feels familiar, it’s not your mission that needs changing. It might be how your story is (or isn’t) being told.

Doing good isn’t always enough: how do you make sure the world sees it?

Branding is often mistaken for a new logo or visual refresh. In reality, it’s a strategic foundation, encompassing strategy, verbal identity, and visual identity, that enables your organization to show up clearly, intentionally, and consistently in the world. 

A strong brand brings together:

Together, these elements form a shared toolkit your team can always return to. These pieces make it easier to communicate, make decisions, and for others to understand and trust your work.

When that toolkit is missing, even the strongest missions struggle to be seen.

Across our work with purpose-driven organizations, foundations and businesses, certain patterns come up again and again. These aren’t failures; they’re signals that an organization has grown, evolved, or changed.

 Here are six signs your brand might no longer reflect your organization’s vision. 

Your organization has evolved, but your brand hasn’t kept pace.

This often shows up as a website or visual identity that no longer reflects the scope, ambition, or maturity of your work. Teams tell us things like, “We’ve grown a lot, but our brand still reflects who we were years ago.”

In these cases, a rebrand isn’t about reinvention. It’s about ensuring your outward presence reflects who you truly are today.

The team at Arts Midwest came to us with a brand and website that wasn’t reflecting the true breadth and impact of their work. In close collaboration, we tapped into their passion for connecting people, art, and place—bringing that energy to life through a bold visual expression. 

The result is a vibrant, dynamic brand inspired by their vision of “Amplifying Midwestern Creativity.”

Your new brand reflects your true identity.

Internally, your team is aligned. Externally, people still don’t quite get it.

You may find yourselves repeatedly explaining what it is you do exactly, to your funders, partners, or new audiences. Not only does this get exhausting, but it’s not landing in a way that resonates.

This is often a sign that your team’s internal purpose hasn’t yet been translated into clear, audience-centered storytelling.

Our work with Caribou helped their team build a digital presence that reflects their expertise, portfolio, and focus areas. The website communicates the complexity and ambition of their mission-driven work—reimagining and delivering impact in the digital age. 

Complexity can breed inconsistencies. 

As organizations expand their programs, audiences, or geographic reach, it becomes more difficult to maintain cohesion across the board. Different teams create materials in different ways. The brand starts to feel either rigid or fragmented.

A refreshed brand system can bring both simplicity and flexibility, helping teams communicate cohesively without flattening the complexity of the work.

Acelero, Inc. needed a partner to develop a clear brand architecture for its parent organization and its subsidiaries, Acelero Learning and Shine Early Learning. The goal was to create cohesion across all three brands and websites, while establishing distinct messaging that clearly defined each organization’s role and purpose.

Milestone moments can prompt reflection. Or just as often, your organization makes so many little shifts over the years that one day you look back and think, we look a lot different today.

Leadership transitions, anniversaries, gradual (or sudden!) shifts in strategy can all create a sense that the brand no longer fully represents the organization. Teams want to honour their history while also acknowledging how far they’ve come.

In these moments, rebranding can be a way to bridge past and present — respecting legacy while making space for what’s next.

As Ribbon Community, formerly AIDS Vancouver, approached its 40th anniversary, the organization took the opportunity to reflect on its legacy and reimagine its future. Through community engagement and internal reflection, they recognized a desire to move beyond being defined by a place or a diagnosis. The result was Ribbon Community: a new name and visual identity that honours their history while centering connection, belonging, and growth. Read more on the work we did together.

In fast-changing environments, nonprofit teams need to move quickly.

We often hear from organizations that are constantly creating new materials from scratch or struggling to respond to external events in a timely, confident way. Without clear brand guidelines, templates, or messaging tools, communication becomes reactive and exhausting.

A strong brand equips teams with the tools they need to respond thoughtfully — even under pressure.

TransLash came to us wanting their brand and website to better reflect both their impact and the urgency of their work. As a wave of anti-trans legislation was being introduced across the United States, they needed a powerful digital platform that could track these bills in real time while also amplifying trans voices, stories, and resources. Together, we built a bold new brand and website designed for this pivotal moment, including a dynamic legislation tracker to support advocacy and awareness.

Every new initiative feels a bit off. Every campaign feels like a reset.

When a brand isn’t designed to grow with an organization, it becomes a constraint rather than a support. Teams spend more time worrying about whether something “fits” than focusing on impact.

A well-built brand should evolve alongside your organization — supporting growth instead of slowing it down.

Our work with Start Early has spanned beyond our initial brand work together; we have worked with their team to develop a brand that would have capacity to grow and evolve alongside their org as they expanded over the years. We wanted to ensure their brand pieces didn’t feel restrictive, and would support their long-term ambitions.

When branding work is done thoughtfully, the shift is felt both internally and externally.

Teams often tell us that after a rebrand:

Most importantly, the brand begins to support the work instead of competing with it.

You don’t need to have all the answers to get started; what matters most is honest reflection.

A few questions to start asking yourself, and other folks on your team:

These kinds of questions can help you assess whether your brand is still serving your mission or quietly holding it back.

Branding, at its core, is about making sure that good work is understood, remembered, and trusted.

For organizations doing meaningful, often complex work, clarity is an act of care — for your team, your community, and the people you serve. When your brand truly reflects who you are, it becomes a powerful ally in advancing your mission.

This post was originally published June 24, 2025. It has since been updated to provide a more in-depth definition of heading tags.

Heading tags are an important part of creating content that is usable, accessible and optimized for search engines. However, I still find that people don’t know how to use them properly. 

In this article, I’m going to teach you the basics of how to properly use heading tags: what are the rules, what do they affect and what are common mistakes to avoid. 

My goal is to help you publish content that is properly formatted so your readers, search engines and screen readers can more easily hear what you have to say.

Heading tags are HTML semantic elements that are used to introduce the content that follows. They are important, foundational tools to help with accessibility, usability, SEO, readability and more. 

Heading tags provide hierarchy to your content (like a nested bulleted list—I’ll expand this shortly). There are six levels of heading tags (H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6) though H5 and H6 are rarely required. 

Here are a few other terms that are often mistakenly used interchangeably with ‘heading’. 

Pages have title tags that are different from headings.

A title tag is the title that shows up on search engine results pages (SERPs). Your page also has an on-page title. This is your H1.

That on-page title may also appear on another page, (say a card linking to your blog post) where it could show up as an H2 or H3. The point is that your page title is separate from your headings. 

Web pages don’t need subtitles. I want to say this is a darling from the publishing industry sneaking into our digital lingo, but books don’t really need subtitles either. A heading tag is not a subtitle. 

A subhead could be used interchangeably with the H2s to H6s on your page. So if you’re referring to every heading that excludes your H1, subhead or subheading would be an accurate term. 

In print, headers appear at the top of your printed page. They often include the name of the book, the author and the page you’re on.

The head of the page is where important code goes (like your page title, Google Analytics snippets, etc.)

There are a lot of terms that are either similar or that serve similar purposes as headings, but in this article, we are focusing on the HTML semantic element. 

Proper heading tags help with:

But maybe the best way to communicate the benefit of heading tags is through an example.

So imagine you visit a page that looks like this. 

It feels like a scientific paper, doesn’t it? Like if you read it, you’ll get an award or be eligible as a PhD candidate. It’s not accessible, it’s not welcoming. It’s intimidating.

What if instead it looked like this?

It’s the exact same content but now it breathes, it’s easy for you to scan and it helps make sense of what you’re about to read, which makes it easier to absorb.

As I mentioned earlier, heading tags don’t just make things pretty: they add a layer of meaning by showing relationships between sections.

One of the ways I like to illustrate this is to imagine we’re going to write a page about pets. So the outline for this page could look something like this: 

Within pets, we have two kinds of animals: dogs and cats. And under each animal, there are three breeds. By formatting our outline using nested bullet points, we are visually showing the structure of our content between these concepts (dogs and cats are a kind of pet, Golden retrievers, bulldogs and poodles are a kind of dog, etc.)

That’s a lot of complexity that we’re able to communicate very quickly. 

Heading tags work in the exact same way as a nested bulleted list: they communicate this hierarchy and structure. So in this page about pets, Pets will be our H1, our animals (dogs and cats) will be our H2s and the breeds under each animal will be our H3s. 

There are six important rules for content publishers when it comes to heading tags.

Let’s take a look at each individually.

As we can see from the image, size does kind of matter. And of course it does! It is how sighted users identify hierarchy after all. But this size doesn’t have to be consistent across your entire website. 

The H1 on your page for example might be bigger than the one on your article page. 

Now if your on-page title isn’t an H1, that is frequently an issue a developer has to fix. Similarly, if other elements outside of your page’s content are H1s (I frequently see “Subscribe to Newsletter” or even the name of the organization in the footer as an H1), you’ll need a developer’s help. 

Usually you can control the heading tags within the body of your content and there you should make sure you don’t assign additional H1s.

These are often choices that happen in design or sometimes in the way a page is developed but the first element in your page’s main content should be the page title, not an image, not breadcrumbs, not eyebrow text… 

Good web practices state that you start your page with the on-page title, which is your H1.  

This should go without saying but it does need to be said. The function of a heading tag is to describe to a user the content they’re about to consume. 

The reason heading tags help with SEO is because they provide rich opportunities for keywords that you want to rank for. So if you want your page to show up for relevant searches, searches it provides answers to, you want to use the real estate of your H1 to include the topic the page is going to be about. 

As opposed to writing a headline that is coy, vague, mysterious, or artsy.

This is the way heading tags should be used: your page starts with an H1, then the two main sections of the page are introduced with H2s.

As you add subpoints within a section, that’s when you move on to the next heading level. So in this case, the first H2 has two H3s within it, the second H2 has one. 

You rarely will need to use anything past H3. If you’re using an H5 or H6, there’s likely an issue with the structure. 

Just like your H1 should describe the content you’re covering on your page, your subheads should describe the content they’re about. 

It’s probably easiest to understand how to best use heading tags by looking at the frequent mistakes I’ve come across over the years.

Like we did with the rules, let’s take a look at these in a little more depth. 

You’re writing your blog post and you’ve got this statement that you think is going to change the world if everyone could just read it. What do you do? Make it an H1, nice and big. 

Don’t do that! A heading tag is not an aesthetic choice.

This is a bit of a variation of the first mistake. Sometimes you are using the right heading level in the right place to introduce the next section. The problem? You’re writing a paragraph.

Your heading is there to quickly summarize and describe what someone is about to read. You’re removing friction – a reader should be able to see your heading at a glance and quickly process it.

Maybe you understand that an H1 goes first, then an H2…but every time you go down the page and seeing a heading, you’re assigning it the next level. In the image above, what we’re communicating is that ‘Recent work’ is a subset of ‘Who we are’. Think back to the concept of nested bulleted lists: 

If Pets is an H1, Dogs is an H2, Cats should not be an H3 because it’s not a subset of Dogs.

This is the most frequent mistake, and the culprit is usually (but not always) a little bit of mistake 1. 

Oftentimes, I’ll see an H1 as the on-page title, which is great, but the next heading is an H3. Usually the reason is because the publisher wants to communicate that this is a smaller section than the main subsection which they’re about to introduce with an H2. 

We also see this issue in the example above with the dreaded eyebrows. Eyebrows are mini headings above a heading and they’re a bit of a nightmare to code properly.

Usually they exist so you can be extra long and verbose with your heading (see mistake 2), but still properly summarize what the content is going to be about.

Now that you know how to properly use heading tags, how do you easily check them? If you’re the content publisher, you can see which heading tag you have assigned on the backend (check out our guide to publishing content on WordPress).

Otherwise, you can right click on your headings, and click Inspect which will pop open a sidebar with the code and there you can see which heading you have been. But the easiest is to use a browser extension that will tell you a little quicker. My favourite one is the SEO Pro Extension. I find it useful to checking all of a page’s SEO elements, from title tag and meta description to the heading tags. Just click on the Headings tab and there you’ll quickly see all the headings on your page in order.

Next time you’re doing a content audit, give your heading tags some love. We’ve got a free, downloadable PDF checklist you can take back to your team (so you can be the expert in the room).

When it comes to finding the right agency for your website redesign, the quality of your Request for Proposals (RFP) directly influences the quality of the proposals you will receive.

As an agency that reviews hundreds (maybe thousands??) of RFPs every year, we’ve seen it all: from the most detailed and technical briefs, to the vague one-pagers copied and pasted from ChatGPT that leave us with more questions than answers. 

The difference between the two can mean the difference between a project that runs on time and on budget… and one that doesn’t.

This guide will walk you through what to include, what to avoid, and a few insider tips to help your RFP stand out for all the right reasons.

Your RFP is often the first touchpoint potential agencies will have with your team, so being clear from the start is crucial. A strong RFP should:

Here are 5 elements we recommend including in your RFP. 

Give potential partners a sense of who you are and why you exist. This is your chance to make them care about your mission, and provide context as to why you’re doing this project now. Maybe you’re about to celebrate a milestone anniversary, or you finally have buy-in from your Board; either way, context is key.

You should include:

Note: If you can, include baseline website metrics like traffic volume, online conversions, or donation totals. They help agencies understand the scope and tailor solutions more specifically to your needs.

Clarity here helps potential partners shape a more accurate proposal. Include your current tech stack, and anything you’re hoping to have in the next iteration of your site. Be sure to include:

Set the bar high: Ask potential agencies or web designers about their philosophy and approach when it comes to accessibility. It should never be an afterthought, and any reputable agency should have no problem addressing your concerns.

Your organization might not have the luxury of knowing the exact budget in the RFP stage. But even including an approximate range helps agencies tailor their proposals more accurately to your needs. And it also means you won’t waste your time reviewing proposals that are way over your budget or that clearly don’t get the scope of what you’re looking for.

It also helps to address any timeline expectations and if anything is driving the work: a milestone anniversary, launching a campaign, new leadership transition. Whatever it is, context is key.

Include:

Indicate whether you would like agencies to outline their project process, and how in-depth you would like that overview to be.

Understanding an agency’s process can give you valuable insight into how their team operates, whether they follow a consistent and structured approach, and how involved your team will be at each stage of the work.

If requested, project phases might include (but are not limited to):

Advise potential agencies how to structure their proposal so you can compare apples to apples. Typically, this includes:

Insider Tip: It helps to state whether your team is open to an introductory call ahead of the submission deadline. Many agencies find it useful to hear more about the project firsthand before shaping their approach.

Saying “we want a better user experience” can mean a lot of different things. Define what pain points you’re experiencing and what success looks like more specifically.

Don’t gloss over your expectations around content for the site. Content needs to be audited, planned, organized, outlined, created, reviewed, and published. What do you expect the agency to take on, and what do you have internal capacity for? If your expectations are that the agency owns 100% of content needs, be clear about this in your RFP (and expect the budget to reflect that).

We’ve seen it before: an organization comes to us in hopes of a full website redesign, but their brand hasn’t been visited in… a while. It’s difficult to build something on top of a shaky foundation, and brand problems often masquerade as website problems. We highly recommend evaluating your brand before embarking on a website redesign journey.

Websites need to be maintained well beyond launch. Your RFP should state whether you expect the agency to handle updates, hosting, and security after launch, or if you plan to tackle this internally. We don’t recommend making support a part of the RFP requirements, but you should ask what post-launch maintenance would look like.

Before you release your RFP, read it again from the perspective of your dream agency partner. What would you want them to know about your organization, your team, and your project? You’re giving potential vendors a glimpse into your world. You want them to care about your mission and have all the context they would need to create a proposal that will make you think, “That’s EXACTLY what we need!”

A thoughtful, detailed RFP will help you find the right partner who understands your mission, meshes well with your team, and delivers a solution that will grow with you over time.

If you want to make sure your RFP attracts the right responses, start with clarity, be upfront about your needs, and always share the “why” behind the project. The better the brief, the better the partnership, and the better the end result.

We’ve wanted to do this for a while: dig into the website analytics across social impact organizations and see what patterns emerge. What’s working? What’s not? What’s similar? What’s different? Is AI actually destroying organic search or is that just a headline?

This year, we finally did it. We analyzed Google Analytics 4 (GA4) accounts across nonprofits, foundations and service organizations to surface insights that might actually be useful.

Here are six takeaways worth paying attention to.

This sounds basic, but it’s foundational. Too many organizations are flying blind because their analytics aren’t configured to track what actually matters.

A few things to prioritize:

If gathering data is painful, you won’t do it. Make it easy to see what’s happening at a glance.

The homepage is the most viewed page across every account we analyzed, accounting for over 20% of all pageviews. But here’s the problem: it’s common for half of all homepage visitors to leave without visiting another page.

That’s a lot of people walking in and walking right back out.

The homepage is tricky to design because you need to be clear about who it’s for while still letting other audiences navigate where they need to go. But if one in two people are bouncing, something isn’t working.

When you’re optimizing, test different approaches. Where should someone go next? A donation form? An about page? A piece of content? A report you’ve published? A newsletter signup? 

Note: When testing different approaches, give each change enough time to perform. You won’t see meaningful results overnight. Measure over a couple months and adjust one element at a time so you can clearly understand what’s driving the change.

Get clear on the best next step you want people to take, then focus your homepage on that and measure whether they’re taking it.

Across accounts, content pages (blog posts, articles, resources, insights) make up a large share of total pageviews and an even larger share of landing pages with one in four sessions beginning on a blog page.

More importantly, organizations that invest in content show a different pattern altogether. They tend to have more diversified page views across many pages, a wider mix of acquisition channels and less reliance on a single page like the homepage. 

If you don’t have a strategy for attracting your audience through your blog (or equivalent), then this is the year to get serious about it. That, along with…

Email accounts for just 3.4% of traffic portfolio-wide. That’s lower than referral traffic, lower than organic social and far lower than it should be. 

But here’s what’s interesting: the accounts that see stronger traffic from email also tend to have strong site-wide performance overall. And among accounts tracking revenue, the highest performers have meaningful email programs.

Building and maintaining an active email list creates a level of consistency that few other channels can offer. Email is also one of the few traffic sources you can partially control. It reduces your dependence on algorithms and external platforms.

It’s worth noting that email and content go hand in hand. It’s very difficult to do email well without having something worthwhile to send people to. 

Ultimately, the organizations doing both content and email well are the ones with the strongest revenue to show for it. My biggest recommendation for 2026 is to reinvigorate your email program. 

Note: It is possible that for a lot of accounts, email traffic is not being tagged properly and is getting lumped in with direct traffic. If your email marketing platform has link tracking built in, make sure you have that functionality turned. If it doesn’t, use Google Campaign URL Builder to manually add UTM parameters. 

Google offers nonprofits up to $10,000 per month in free search ads through the Google Ad Grant program. Yet most eligible organizations aren’t taking advantage of it and have minimal paid search activity.

That’s a missed opportunity. Accounts that scaled their paid search investment maintained engagement rates in the 50–55% range, suggesting the traffic they acquired was qualified rather than low-intent. In other words, they increased volume without sacrificing quality.

If you’re eligible for the Google Ad Grant and not using it, it’s worth investigating.

Organic search declined 1.4% between 2024 and 2025. That’s it. It’s not the cliff people have been heralding that organic traffic would be hurtled off. Not yet at least, not for this sector. Or not for any of the accounts we’ve reviewed. 

The decline is concentrated in a handful of accounts. One of the largest drops came from an account that had to remove high-ranking content at the start of the year due to the political climate, not because of AI.

That’s not to say AI isn’t changing the way people search but just that we’re not seeing obvious signs of the dramatic collapse many feared.

Here’s what to do if you want to dig deeper: compare your organic traffic year-over-year. Which landing pages are dominating? Is there a change? Check Google Search Console. Are you ranking for different types of searches this year versus last? Is there a difference in clicks or page rankings? Focus on the biggest differences.

And continue to optimize your content to show up on Google and for LLMs. The techniques are similar anyway.

The digital landscape keeps shifting, but this year’s data reinforces some enduring truths: organizations that invest in content, build owned audiences through email, and maintain clean analytics tend to outperform those chasing quick wins or relying too heavily on any single channel.

The AI question remains open. We’re not seeing the dramatic SEO collapse some predicted, but the way people interact with search is clearly evolving. The organizations best positioned for whatever comes next are those with diversified traffic sources and direct relationships with their audiences.

Want help with your website analytics? If you’d like help setting up or reviewing your analytics account, or if you want to join the 2026 benchmarking report, get in touch.