Agile Web Development & Growth Driven Design for Nonprofits

The energy of a room changes when someone suggests that their nonprofit needs a website redesign. Minds go to budgets and time constraints. Visions of red tape and brutal conversations cloud judgment. The idea is tossed around for a while before it is tabled until next quarter/year/decade. And then they all breathe a sigh of relief that they avoided the dreaded website redesign.

But what if it didn’t have to be like this? What if we could get rid of all the bad parts and just keep the benefits of a shiny new site? One that never gets dusty again?

Well, by following a Growth Driven Design model, we can.

Growth Driven Design (GDD) is a modern approach to the web redesign process. It is smoother, more efficient, and more effective. Plain and simple, it’s just better. But exactly what is it?

First, let’s look at the traditional model of a website redesign.

That’s not a super effective way to approach websites. With the GDD approach, the website is treated as a constantly evolving asset rather than a static visual. And it takes just 3 steps:

That final step is the key. Instead of standing back to look at a completed and done website, a GDD website is a process that involves identifying opportunities and making changes to the site every couple of months. So instead of listing everything wrong with your website every couple years, you are upgrading it gradually over time. Your website is always fresh. Always optimized. Always working for your mission.

I mean, think about it. Do you ever see Google or Amazon completely redesign their entire sites? No. They shift a menu, tweak a design element, reshape a button. Little bits at a time. It makes sense. If you want to update your house, you don’t burn it down and start over, do you? No, you pick a room at a time. Apply that thinking to your web-based home as well.

Agile web development is the concept of staying agile throughout the entire process, and improving the project through iterative changes. Being able to remain agile is absolutely necessary because scope creep is inevitable in nearly all web related projects. When you factor in agility, you are allowing for the process to adapt as situations, technologies, trends and goals change.

Nowadays, website hosting platforms and content management systems make it easy to practice agile web development. And we have the late 90s/early 2000s software companies to thank for literally creating the manifesto on agile development. So while the phrases “growth driven design” and “agile web development” seemed to appear just a few years ago, the concept was created by the pioneers of web-based technology.

So to answer the question – it’s not really that different. Growth driven design is a model of agile web development.

Redos are expensive. There’s no beating around the bush there. Overhauling an entire site requires you pull out all the stops from the very start, before you even have a chance to see what is going to work. After launching your GDD site, you can invest in one improvement at a time – and keep track of the ROI you got on that specific change.

Think of how much time you spend on a website redesign. Even if you are hiring an outside company to actually do the design and development, there are no shortcuts. Time is spent:

With a GDD website, not every single decision needs to be made upfront. And honestly, some of the pressure is off knowing that nothing has to be set in stone. If six months down the line, you realize your Outreach Manager was right and certain pages just aren’t resonating with the community, you pivot. Easily. Because the time and resources to adjust are built in.

When the traditional model was created, the internet was a very different place. People maybe visited a website before they called or stopped in. It was a brochure with some fun bells and whistles. Simply having a website legitimized your nonprofit, but it didn’t even necessarily have to be a good website. Now, not only do you absolutely, positively need to exist on the world wide web, you need to be trendy. And not “within the past 5 years” trendy, but Tik Tok trendy.

Needs and priorities change. As those needs and priorities change for your nonprofit, your website should change too. Unfortunately, with a traditional website redesign, this often means starting from scratch. Or, more likely, it means that your website becomes quickly outdated or ineffective at helping your organization achieve its mission.

Each time you run through the “continuous improvement” step of the process, it gives your organization a new chance to address changing needs and respond to the data. It removes the risk of making the “wrong choice” about your website and being stuck with it until the next big redesign.

After you’ve determined your website strategy, the next step is to build a “launchpad” site—one that has all of the features and functionality that your organization needs.

Rather than loading on all of “nice-to-have” and “this-could-be-cool” features hobbled together, you start with the essentials and just a couple extras. Additional features and functionality will be prioritized and implemented over time. After reviewing the data, of course.

The true aim of GDD is to make the biggest, most important upgrades to your website with the least amount of time and effort. Too often with website designs, a lot of time and energy are put into features that end up never being used or seen by visitors. That’s wasted time and energy, not to mention wasted money. Instead, GDD focuses on using data—from actual users of the site—to prioritize and drive updates and changes.

For example, if your nonprofit finds that there are certain pages on your website that receive the majority of your traffic, then updates to those pages will probably have the highest level of priority.

You can also use data to identify problem areas, like pages with low conversion rates, high bounce rates, and more. Based on your overall goals for the website (increase donations, recruit volunteers, build your lists, etc.), you can organize your priorities to help you meet them.