American Rivers Uses Blog to Gather Advice From Supporters
Ever wonder why an advocacy group should have a blog? Sure, promoting issues is a great reason, but here is another: write a blog to engage your supporters in your efforts to redesign your website.
And that is exactly what American Rivers is doing. Its new Designing Inward Out blog keeps its supporters posted on the group’s new web design project and asks for audience input.
And this makes perfect sense. After all, an advocacy website is only useful if it serves the needs of its audience.
Far too often, organizations design their websites to meet internal needs and conceptions, often mirroring its organizational structure in its website navigation menu. This makes no sense.
The key is to package the content and opportunities on your website in a way that makes it easy to find by the people using the website, who usually don’t know and don’t care about how the organization has divided itself. They only care that issue information is easily linked to advocacy opportunities, that contact information is easy to find, especially when they want to respond to a specific item found on the website.
So American Rivers‘ experiment of using a blog to reach out to its supporters for advice as it redesigns its website is a great way to use a blog. I am sure its website redesign will be much better for it.