I recently spent a few days in Glacier National Park. I will definitely be back – and can imagine this park being amazing any time of the year.
Glacier is in Montana’s Rocky Mountains, northeast of Whitefish. I arrived, played, and left just as snow-filled clouds were rolling in. I needed to be moving fast at this point on the road trip, but I regret not being able to stay at least four days here earlier in the season.
“Michelle completed a full website redesign for us at the IMPACT Conference. She was great to work with – flexible, prompt, and really took the time to understand our unique needs, organizational history, and capacity in order to find sustainable solutions for us. I highly recommend Michelle for organizations looking for marketing and design work!”
Laura Megivern
President, Board of Directors
IMPACT Conference
Learn more about the website work I do with nonprofits.
A non-profit website redesign is an exciting prospect, presenting an organization the opportunity to modernize options, rethink user needs, and update, well, everything, from text to images to site architecture. But a new website should lean heavily on one major component of the old website and that’s analytics. If you have Google Analytics (GA) installed on your current website, it’s likely a treasure trove of information which should inform your redesign.
Here are the ways you should use Google Analytics to inform your non-profit website redesign:
When I embarked on a road trip across the US, I wanted to see new cities and states, national and state parks, old friends, and new views. As the wheels kept turning, it became obvious that my real purpose was to take a coffee tour across the country. Of course, I knew I was addicted (ahem, passionate) about lattes, pastries, and coffee shop life before embarking on my travels, but the way I enjoyed coffee shops at home had almost become second nature – they had become my “third place” each weekend and even many mornings and evenings.
On the road, my enthusiasm for coffee (and coffee shops) became vital once I could no longer rely on the routines of home. Soon I found myself visiting one or two, sometimes three, new coffee shops in a day. Coffee shops became the places I had breakfast, picked up local newspapers, overheard local chatter and accents, got my caffeine fix, and continued to work for my marketing clients.
On August 30th, I rolled into Eugene, Oregon and visited my 100th coffee shop on this, so far, seven month road trip across the United States. Tailored Coffee Roasters was a great landing spot for my 100th and I enjoyed a small iced caramel latte, a slice of really great avocado toast, and good conversation with the barista.
Here’s a best-of recap of the 100 coffee shops I’ve visited in the previous seven months.
If you want a romantic getaway in a stunning setting, Crater Lake National Park would be my suggestion. Even though I was camping in the park this month, I decided to treat myself to a little bit of luxury and Crater Lake certainly offers the best of it.
Crater Lake National Park is in southern Oregon, in the Cascade Mountains. Its namesake isn’t actually a crater, rather it’s a caldera. A caldera is the depression left by a collapsed volcano and Crater Lake’s Mount Mazama is thought to have lost 2,500 to 3,500 feet in height around 5700 BC. In the following 700 years, the lake slowly filled in with fresh rainwater and snowmelt.
Redwood National Park has been on my bucket list for quite some time. I used to see photos of the tall, majestic redwoods and something in my soul would stir. I’ve always wanted to travel out west to see them and I finally had the chance this August.
Redwood National Park is home to some of the tallest trees on earth, but it is also one of the most diverse national parks I have visited. In addition to the redwoods, there are prairies, oak woodlands, rivers, and nearly 40 miles of beautiful coastline.
A blog is a great tool for non-profits. It gives you control over your own news channel essentially.
Without a blog, you can put out press releases and photos all day long, but if the news outlets don’t pick it up, it feels like the news never happened. If you have your own blog, you can post the press release there, along with photos, links, and more materials, then share all of that on social media, on your website, and in an e-newsletter. But if you’re thinking of starting a blog and don’t have a lot of content, you may wonder how to get started.
A blog editorial calendar will help you with timing, messaging, and management. Here’s how to build one:
