Whether your association needs a rebrand or a new website, your biggest challenge isn’t always finding the solution to the problem at hand. Instead, it’s clearing the hurdles of final approvals from your stakeholders.

Projects run more smoothly when every stakeholder is involved. That said, demanding schedules may prevent your leadership from attending every meeting. When presenting designs for their review, there’s no worse feeling than watching progress derailed by an ungrounded opinion.

Of course, website design is a mix of art and science. No one can predict with total certainty how users will respond to a site’s appearance or how it functions. However, for a successful project, any opinion guiding a design’s direction should be supported by strategy and facts rather than personal preferences. After circulating a project for feedback with your launch date on the line, it may be tempting to respond with “Take your left-field opinion and shove it.” Of course, you wouldn’t say that. Our goal today is to avoid experiencing that frustration.

But setting opinions aside doesn’t mean your organization can’t have a website you or your leadership team love. In fact, your preferences are essential — when the time is right. But to secure a design that works, you must put strategy first.

Opinions Lead Organizations Astray from Rebranding Goals

Taking a strategic approach to your project means the design is built on a foundation of research and proven data about your association and its members. Crafting a design based on your preferences or those of your board is a risky use of your budget. Personal opinions are not only subjective, they’re much more volatile.

Past experience or even someone’s mood that day can inform their preferences. For example, a client we worked with rejected a design option because the colors resembled the rival school where they went to college. These kinds of opinions have nothing to do with the problem you’re trying to solve for your brand.

No matter how much your CEO trusts their personal taste, you can’t allow those impulses to guide your project’s decisions. You’re working to create a tool that will strengthen your association’s bond with its current members while also appealing to the next generation. Designing to connect with those specific audiences requires more than opinions and gut feelings to be successful.

For example, even though your association is targeting Gen Z with a digital project, your stakeholder feedback comes from your board. Everyone on your leadership team is highly intelligent and well-intended, but their preferences may have little relevant connection with the experiences of a 30-something, digitally savvy, and diverse population. You must provide them with the right context for the project and its goals so they can deliver a thoughtful evaluation. Otherwise, they will naturally fall back on offering personal opinions.

Strategy Takes the Lead on Successful Redesign Projects

Every marketing and communications executive knows that most successful projects start by following a strategic framework. No matter whether you’re planning a single digital campaign or a full rebranding for your association, your project has to start with creating a strategy document. The key to success is ensuring this document is well-founded and utilized throughout the entire project, by your agency and your team.

A strategy document is a tool built during a project’s discovery process that creates a guide for every decision to follow. At the beginning, you and your agency partner should work together and define the challenges your project needs to solve and other key details. 

If success is solely defined as creating a design that pleases your boss, then your project is in danger of starting on the wrong foot. You have to prioritize fulfilling your association’s objectives over satisfying one individual’s opinion.

Research Forms the Foundation of Any Strategy Document

Depending on the size of your project, you can apply multiple forms of research to create a strategy document. For example, site analytics data such as visitor traffic, session lengths, and user information allow you and your agency to build a baseline of quantitative data. As discovery moves forward, interviews with your internal teams and user surveys are among the ways to get qualitative insights. 

In the end, your strategy document reveals at least three defining attributes of your project:

• Audience: Your target users and their needs.
• Messaging: How your association will communicate to its audience.
• Goals: What the project must accomplish for your association.

At key milestones, you and your decision-makers should reference the approved strategy document to resolve design questions. A solid strategy gives you the confidence and authority to push back on unfounded opinions, even when they come from people that outrank you.

3 Tips to Avoid Common Pitfalls of Project Decision-Making

You and your stakeholders will be providing feedback to your digital agency as your project takes shape. Avoid costly changes to your timeline (and your budget) by applying these 3 rules:

1. Depend on a Single Source of Truth

Whether your strategy document remains accessible on your internal network or framed on your wall, it should always be available for everyone on your team. It is the guiding light for your organization’s project. Consult the strategy document before every design review, so your internal teams are in the right mindset.

2. Apply Context to Every Decision When Delivering Feedback

If you ask your stakeholders for their opinion, you’ll get their opinion. Instead, request an analysis of your design while giving the right tools to make a decision. Instead of asking, “Which logo appeals to you?” frame the question a different way. Try asking, “Which logo will appeal to our audience and best communicate our message?”

3. Lean Into Your Experts

When your project needs feedback from your leadership team, you don’t have to go into those conversations alone. You should gather your creative team with your organization’s decision-makers in the same room for milestone decisions. That way, your design experts can communicate the rationale behind each option, ensure the conversation stays on track, and address questions that may potentially derail the project.

When Opinions Are Welcome (and Essential) in a Design Project

Placing your organization’s strategic goals ahead of personal preferences may be challenging, but it’s not a constant requirement. Once you’ve established that your project’s needs can be fulfilled with multiple design concepts, you should leverage your preferences to make a final choice.

After all, the right design partner wants you to be proud of the final product. Once your new website or campaign launches, you should love it and be excited, especially if it involves a total rebranding or visual identity. 

Plus, when you have the assurance that every decision was made in service of solving the challenges at hand, your ability to act as your project’s champion grows much easier.

When your member-driven organization needs a new website, searching for a design and development partner feels like the hardest part. Finding an agency with the qualifications and capacity to meet your schedule takes time and research. However, once you’ve hired the right team, the rest is just a matter of sitting back and waiting for your new website to launch and work as it should.

Not so fast.

Successful websites can’t simply be ordered up and delivered like an Amazon package. Redesigns cost more than money. If you want a site that makes a real difference for your organization, you have to invest your time as well. Dedicating time to your project before it officially kicks off ensures your organization receives the full value of its investment. 

You’ll see the best results when both sides of a website project are active participants. Get your collaboration started right by following these steps:

1. Set Aside Expectations and Look Past Prior Website Project History

Website development should start by taking a holistic view of your website’s audience, your organization’s goals, and its messaging strategy. A collaborative examination of those details allows your agency to push past status quo solutions and discover the right approach for your website.

Coming into a website project with rigid, preconceived ideas about what your site requires limits how well your project addresses your organization’s needs. Similarly, if you’ve had a bad experience during a prior website design, you should discuss the details behind that project with your new agency.

What derailed your previous website’s success? Was it internal? Was it external? What was most painful about the process for your team? The right agency will help you identify those roadblocks and come up with tactics to prevent the same issues from occurring.

2. Build a Dream Team of Internal Stakeholders

As head of a marketing or communications team, the website may fall under your jurisdiction. But you can’t manage a website project alone. You need a small but mighty group of 3 to 5 people on your side who will support this project as a key priority from start to finish. 

However, you shouldn’t attempt to recruit every stakeholder in your organization. For example, your CEO may be invested in a new website, but a busy schedule may hamper their availability. But involving all stakeholders in your organization in the day-to-day of the project may shift focus toward concerns related to their roles instead of solving problems for your end users.

Instead, someone from your team can keep all your stakeholders informed as your website design progresses. Keeping everyone in the loop helps prevent the project from being derailed by last-minute changes by allowing key stakeholders to provide feedback throughout the process.

Ultimately, this dream team should have the ownership on approving deliverables and other milestone decisions to ensure the project moves forward. Therefore, thoughtfully curating this team is critical, and each should be experienced with your current website. 

The most important member of your team is the liaison between your organization and the agency. They will be responsible for coordinating meetings and collecting internal feedback. Ideally the liaison would have support on the team from a project coordinator. This person will oversee details such as collecting images, website copy, and other deliverables to satisfy content deadlines. 

3. Be Realistic About Timelines to Protect Your Project Launch Date

Every website project lives or dies based on how well it follows an established timeline. The agency you hire is obligated to deliver your website by a certain date. But your team is just as responsible for ensuring it will be available to attend meetings, provide deliverables, feedback, and approvals, so your project stays on track.

Given the value of your organization’s website, you may be in an understandable rush to relaunch with a new, more functional design. But you have to be realistic about your team’s availability as well as the impact of their other responsibilities.

Before your website project starts, you should carefully review the timeline and honestly share any concerns. Be sure to factor in the availability of your project team and internal stakeholders to ensure your new website remains on track.

For example, someone on your team may have a two-week vacation planned. Or, the deadline you set for all website content to be delivered coincides with your organization’s annual convention. Whatever big events, holidays, or busy periods lie ahead, those need to be factored into your timeline to protect your launch date.

As your organization’s point person, you are responsible for setting up the foundation to keep your team on schedule. For example, you can set up all internal review meetings at the onset of the project so you can ensure availability of your team for all review points throughout the project. The right agency partner will do their part stay on track, but they can only do so much without your help.

4. Do Your Homework Before Any Redesign Work Begins

As a marketer, you know your organization’s website needs improvement. But how well do you really understand the full breadth of its condition?

You don’t have to diagnose your site’s needs — your agency partner will help you with that. But you should take the time to inventory all of your content and understand its purpose, accuracy, and context.

Maybe your organization’s last redesign was five years ago, or it took place before you were hired. But in either case, large websites often have legacy features that no longer apply to the organization’s current goals. Or, worse yet, function in a way no one understands.

Before you and your agency start rebuilding your site, you should ensure all those mysteries are solved. For example, contact your IT team to explain third-party tools or software tied to your current site and understand how they’re utilized.

Plus, you should meet with stakeholders to discuss new features on your organization’s wish list. Websites are challenging enough to develop without your team overextending its timeline and budget to create unnecessary features. But be sure to set expectations ahead of time that all new features will need to be in service of the website goals.

Before any functionality is built or designed, you and your agency partner should understand its purpose and the need it will resolve. By thoroughly understanding your organization’s problems, you and your agency can work together to design the right solution.

Email is far from a fresh idea in communications, which may be why it’s often overlooked. A few years ago, industry watchers were ready to declare the communication channel dead as new messaging platforms arrived.

Now, the explosion of agencies that specialize in email strategy testify to its ongoing value. But in addition to considering what information your organization needs to send and how often, you need to also think about your emails from a design perspective.

An association with decades of history could spend thousands of dollars to create a modern website to present an up-to-date reflection of its identity. But their email communications remain stuck firmly in the past. Instead of driving traffic to your website, your email gets lost in the noise of each member’s inbox.

Any brand ecosystem needs to deliver a cohesive experience to be effective. Email provides an opportunity to create literal links between your members and your website. With the right approach to design, you can ensure your organization is making the most of those connections.

Email Offers Targeted Outreach to Rival Social and Traditional Media

Email doesn’t have the same buzzworthy appeal as social media platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram, or Tiktok. With millions of potential viewers, each channel offers the tantalizing prospect of your message going viral with the right mix of keywords and timing.

But realistically, social media requires time, effort, and energy to make a dent with the audience you need. You need to dedicate resources to monitor each channel, and it’s increasingly difficult to gain traction within the algorithm without a large budget. Much like traditional media, the return on investment can be uneven depending on the campaign and your audience.

Email by contrast is much more targeted. Members and prospective members have confirmed their interest by opting in to receive your information. Your organization can’t waste a valuable opportunity to deliver targeted messages to the audience it needs most.

3 Best Practices for More Impactful Emails

The visual experience of your email needs to be consistent with the rest of your brand. Even if you follow general email best practices for how the copy appears in each message, you need to ask whether your message conforms to the same rules as your website, your printed collateral, and any other touchpoints with your brand.

Are your emails curated to deliver valuable insights to current and prospective members? Do the visuals consistently reflect your brand identity? Is the tone aligned with the rest of your content? Are they adding to the rich narrative of your brand? The more cohesive an experience your organization delivers, the more likely your message is to stand out amid a cluttered inbox.

To underscore their value, your emails should meet the following 3 best practices:

1. Adhere to Brand Guidelines

Every email you send should reinforce your organization’s brand. The copy should reflect the same voice and tone used by your organization and visual elements should be consistent with your brand identity.

2. Be Focused with Your Content

Emails should be simple, direct, and relevant to the recipient’s interests. Your members will lose interest and unsubscribe if your message is cluttered with too much content, not relevant to their needs, or filled with ads. 

Your distribution list targets an audience who is interested in your association. But you’re competing with each personal and marketing email they receive every day. Concise, targeted, and timely communication will allow your message to cut through the noise.

3. Encourage (and Monitor) Action from Readers

Emails are a powerful platform to deliver updates to your members, but it’s not the place to tell the full story. Emails need an image, a headline, and a brief teaser describing the content you’re promoting — and that’s all. If your members are interested, they will click the link to your site and find out more.

Emails are a powerful tool to drive visitors to your site, but they also inform your content strategy. You have to ensure your organization tracks user behavior on your site and in your emails to determine what is attracting readers. Once you know your audience’s interests, you can adjust your strategy to keep providing relevant content.

Emails Create Excitement for Your Organization’s Programs

Email provides a key point of contact between your association and its members at times when your information is most vital. For example, associations rely on successful annual events to engage members and encourage retention. Elevated event branding is an extension of your brand identity and email provides an effective way to promote your organization’s events to the right audience.

The most successful email programs deliver on the brand promise of the program and empathize with your members at each stage of their journey. For example, when communicating around an event:

• Advance emails (Save the Date, Invitations, Announcements) need to reflect the tone of the event and ramp up member excitement.
• During the event, provide support and value with a segmented attendee email with that day’s agenda and details.
• Don’t forget people who did not attend the event. Share emails outlining highlights and event photos to generate FOMO, driving attendance for the next event.
• Last but never least, collect feedback with an email survey of attendees to inform your strategy going forward.

In each case, emails allow you to showcase the value of your organization as well as its activities. But you can only demonstrate those details with the benefit of thoughtful design. 

Clear, concise emails that express a strong visual connection to who you are as an organization underscore that your emails — and your subscribers’ time — are valuable. Don’t allow these critical points of connection to deliver anything less than a positive impression to your members.

Chances are that prospective members will first meet your association through your website and your existing members use it as a primary touchpoint. And their interaction with your site will influence whether or not they choose to pursue or renew membership. Therefore, when you start a website project, you’ll want to ensure that you’ve done all you can to guarantee its success.

Your website is your digital front door and one of your most important investments. It’s got to look, feel, and function in a way that helps attract and engage members over time. In short, your website has a big responsibility for which it cannot afford to fail.

While a website project is not easy, its foundational elements are straightforward. When working in concert, these five elements can result in a website that’s relevant, useful, and engaging to members — present and future.

1. UX: A Strategic Approach

User experience (UX) encompasses all the ways in which users interact with your website. Its goal is to make user interactions as easy, satisfying, and useful as possible. 

Good UX is based on your answers to three seemingly-simple questions:

• Why does our organization exist? Your association’s mission should be your north star, guiding every decision you make. 
• Who are we here to serve? Your association can’t be (nor should it try to be) all things to all people. The more specific you can be in defining your audience, the better.  Lean into data and analytics to help you understand exactly who your current site users are. You’ll also need to determine who you’d like your future users to be. 
• What must our website do to help users succeed? Your users’ needs and goals  should inform all UX design. Mapping out their journeys will help you visualize their interactions at various touchpoints and qualitative or quantitative research can help validate your assumptions. 

These answers provide valuable information you can use to inform site architecture, site map, wireframes, design, development approach, maintenance plans — basically every corner of your website.

2. UI: Designed For Members

User interface (UI) refers to your website’s visual and interaction design. Once you’ve developed a strategic approach based on your members’ needs, you should design accordingly. An off-the-shelf template designed to meet the needs of any generic association simply won’t do. 

Your association should already have a strong brand system designed to communicate your story and appeal directly to your audiences. If not, stop. Go no further. Engage a branding partner who can work with you to create a comprehensive, cohesive, and flexible system. 

When you have a strong brand system, leverage the design tools in your brand guidelines to tell your story, craft a distinct digital presence and bring the user experience to life

Good visual design is no longer a luxury. The next generation of members are digitally discerning and expect a seamless, impactful, and inspiring website. If you want members to trust you to represent their industry or cause, you need to reinforce that trust with excellent design. Good design takes your website from a necessary tool to a high functioning asset that enhances the member experience and amplifies the efforts of every department.

3. Accessibility: Standards Met or Exceeded

Accessibility — making your site usable by people with disabilities — should be top of mind from the beginning of your website project. People with auditory, cognitive, neurological, physical, visual, and speech disabilities require specific considerations and adaptations. 

Every strategic, content, design, and development decision contributes to the final usability and accessibility of the website. You’ll need to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2 requirements as you make these decisions. The level of accessibility (A, AA, and AAA) you meet is up to you — but greater conformance results in more use by more people. 

Neglecting or de-prioritizing accessibility concerns will alienate your members with accessibility needs and open up your organization to costly legal suits.

Don’t forget: another facet of accessibility is ensuring your website is mobile responsive. Your members visit your site on different devices, primarily their mobile phones. Your site should be optimized for your members to be able to interact, consume resources, and engage with your organization regardless of what device they’re on.

4. Integration: Seamless Connections With External Systems and Data 

Integration is your website’s ability to communicate well with external systems and data sources. When done well, the integration is both strategic and seamless (without interruptions). 

However, poor integration can quickly lead to user frustration. For example, a user might enter through the main association website to view the list of upcoming events. As soon as they’re ready to sign up, that member may be taken to an external website (typically the association management system) to register for the event. This external website will often look very different from the main website, which may have that member wondering if they’ve gotten lost. 

Another example of poor site integration: mismatched committee information. A PDF or a static page on your website may not have the up-to-date committee list from your association management system. Outdated information makes your organization look unprofessional, eroding trust and relevance. A better integration would automatically sync the committee information data from the association management system to the website and display it in a user-friendly presentation. 

5. CMS: Flexible and Easy to Manage

The content management system (CMS) allows you to create, edit, and publish content to your site. A good CMS is flexible and customized to your association; its functionality should help you optimize your members’ digital experience. 

Your CMS should anticipate and address your future needs. What if you have a new annual event? Are you able to build a robust landing page for it? What if you need to fight a certain piece of legislation? Can you build a page that will provide timely information to your members and drive action? 

If your website has fresh, compelling content but your staff can’t maintain it, your website will devolve into a useless relic. Your CMS must be easy for your staff to train on and use daily.

Invest Now to Attract and Maintain Members Over Time

UX, UI, accessibility, seamless integration, and CMS are the necessary ingredients to creating a dynamic and valuable member-focused website. When your association is ready to make this all-important investment, make sure you thoughtfully consider each of these elements. Then your website will serve you — and your members — for years to come.

Prospective members can meet your organization in several ways: at a mixer, on your Facebook page, through an article on your website, or through an email a friend forwarded them. The combination of those experiences adds up to something critical: their perception of your brand.

If your design is outdated or inconsistent across touchpoints, you’re giving prospects reason to doubt you. And frankly, they’re already skeptical. There’s no question about it: you need to tell one story of who you are in a cohesive brand experience to win new members. 

Fonts, colors, textures, and images are not trivial details. All brand elements should reiterate your organization’s mission and messaging. A consistent brand experience builds trust and resonance with each interaction. Isn’t that what you want to offer prospective members?

It might be time for your organization to update your materials, so you’re telling your one story masterfully. However, deciding what to prioritize and how to sketch out a reasonable timeline is challenging. Whether you need to start from scratch or attend to just a few elements, you need a solid plan. Here’s how to get started.

Prepare By Auditing Your Current Brand Materials

Perhaps you know exactly what needs updating. But before making decisions, you’ll need to systematically take stock of and prioritize each asset. 

Take Inventory 

Account for your website, emails, social media, event materials and displays, webinars, membership collateral, sponsorship materials, and all other assets. Assign each asset a rating from 1-5 based on the level of potential impact it can have on your organization and members. 

In addition, document:

• Any asset that isn’t “on brand.” Does any touchpoint conflict with your brand identity? Even small conflicts can have real consequences. For example, prospects can fail to recognize you if your marketing collateral uses a different color palette.
• Any deficiencies. Are you missing any key assets? 
• Each asset’s dollar impact. How much value or impact can it generate directly (like additional sponsorship dollars) or lose you in opportunity cost (like lackluster attendance to an event or someone not signing up as a member)

Set a Budget  

Avoid determining your materials update budget purely on cost. Instead, consider what investment is reasonable based on the value to be generated. If a positive outcome was likely, what would you invest to achieve that outcome? 

For example, if you were told that you’re likely to generate $500k in sponsorship dollars for your event if you invest 10% of that goal on branding the event, would you? This exercise gives you a ceiling for what’s reasonable to invest if there was a high degree of certainty in the results. From there, you can reduce the investment based on your ambitions, available resources, and level of certainty in generating that value. 

Allocate Resources 

Ensure you have set up adequate internal and external resources to tackle each project. Even if you have the most capable external vendor to help you through this journey, you still need timely information, decisions, and approvals by your internal team.

Create a Brand Asset Update Timeline 

The following timeline represents an example of a complete brand update. As you approach this process, be patient and realistic. And bear in mind each part of the update affects the following, so the sequencing is important. 

Every organization is different, so you can customize this suggested timeline to one that fits your needs.

Identity and Brand System: Months 1-3

The story you tell, how you talk about yourself, and the value you bring to members should be consistent and complementary. Your logo, colors, fonts, and visual elements bring your story to life in a unique, authoritative way.

Make sure you work diligently — and with an external partner if needed — to build a robust brand system that equips your team and vendors for success.

Website: Months 4-10

Once you’ve solidified your brand identity, you can begin designing and building a website that supports it. The website is your primary communication tool, and it will require the longest time commitment. 

Organizational Primary Brochure: Months 4-6

Your brochure is a foundational product that will establish messaging, tone, and visuals. It’s a vital asset that serves as another face of your business and a detailed reference of your services. Subsequent materials (like presentation decks and sales folders) can follow and complement this primary piece. 

Membership Management Platform: Months 8-10

As you wrap up work on your website, you’ll integrate your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. Your CRM allows members to connect with resources like webinars and registration for organizational events and cannot be an afterthought and disjointed from the rest of their experience on the website. 

Email Templates: Months 9-10

Since email drives traffic to the website, design and deploy your email templates post-website launch. Remember: a good email depends on crisp, clear, concise content.  

Membership/Sponsorship Sales Folder and One-Sheets: Months 6-7

When you sell a membership, you’ll want to leave a sales folder in that new member’s hands. And one-pagers can be just the right thing when you need a brief, easy-to-read marketing piece. Both of these assets play an important supporting role and build from what you’ve established in your organizational brochure. 

Presentation Decks: Months 6-7

Decks can be built alongside sales folders and one-sheets and are also inspired by the established organization brochure, website, and brand guidelines. You’ll use it to present information to potential sponsors, members, or partners. A customized PowerPoint template, another must-have asset, will help you create presentations quickly and professionally.  

Event Design: Variable/Ad hoc

Event design has a unique place in your brand update timeline. Membership organizations typically start marketing events a minimum of 2 months in advance. The development of an event look and feel should start 6-8 weeks before you want those materials to go live, depending on the complexity of the event. 

A well designed event not only drives attendance, but also helps to communicate the caliber of an event to potential sponsors. Reimagined events have the opportunity to tremendously increase sponsorship revenue.

Membership Campaigns: 24/7/365

Membership organizations like yours need to actively communicate your value with year-round efforts. As soon as the core corporate communications materials (identity system, brochure, and sales kits) are complete, you’re ready for your membership campaign.

Robust, Lively Brands Are More Compelling to Prospective Members

Today’s digital natives have high expectations and low tolerance for counterintuitive, disjointed design. So use all of your brand elements to create and maintain your story and your vision. That’s the way to earn trust and make your organization memorable, impactful, and sustainable to future members.