Five Reasons Why WordPress Is Ideal For Small Nonprofits

"WordPress Is The Best" by Allwin Samuel Jeba

If you’re like most nonprofits, retooling and redesigning your website so that it’s more social is a frequent topic of conversation.

Facebook launched a series of social plugins that you’d like to implement on your site. Adding a blog to your site is also something you’ve been considering. And wouldn’t it be great to someday add a private social community to your site?

Have you outgrown your website?

It seems that getting serious about a site redesign always brings you to the same dead end:

That free website your friend built years ago will not scale with your organization. Plus, the 1997 look and feel of your site doesn’t have the charm it used to.

Examples of nonprofits using WordPress

More and more nonprofits have been using WordPress for their website platform. Check out these three sweet examples of nonprofit websites running on WordPress:

Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation – Run by a major non-profit in Canada.
Joint Use – Uses WordPress to power a variety of features, including a BuddyPress discussion board.
Boy’s Life Magazine – Showcases the talents of top designers, writers, game developers and illustrators.

Five reasons why WordPress is ideal for small nonprofits

Fellow blogger, Chris Cree published an article yesterday called “5 Reasons Why WordPress is the Ideal Platform for Small Business Websites”. All five reasons apply to nonprofits as well.

Easy To Use – If you can edit a Word Doc, you can publish webpages with WordPress. And with themes like Headway, designing the layout and style can be done without any HTML or CSS knowledge.
Solid SEO – WordPress, along with a solid theme and the right SEO plugins gives you “everything you need to rapidly climb up to the front page of Google”.
Dynamic Content – WordPress is the number one blogging platform on the planet, allowing you to publish posts, allow readers to subscribe by RSS and comment on posts.
Inexpensive – After the initial costs, monthly hosting fees can run as low as $5 per month. Plus, the ease-of-use factor means that you don’t have to pay a designer every time you need to make tweaks.
Powerful Social Media Tool – Although Chris lists this reason last, WordPress as a social media tool is one of the top reasons most folks use it as their CMS platform. Over 250 of the 10,000+ plugins – developed by the WordPress community – enhance your sites social media functionality.

If you’re just starting out with WordPress, hop on over to HeadwayVideos.Com. Over the next month, I’ll be beefing up the “WordPress Basics” category with tutorials on building websites with WordPress.

Are you using WordPress for your site? Comment below.

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Read more articles about WordPress

http://www.bethannon.com/ Bet Hannon

I do non-profit marketing and use WP for creating websites for my clients. I've even used the feature of user roles to help the most tech-phobic non-profit staff feel safe in making changes to the website: the are assigned a contributor role, and are reassured that they “can't mess anything up”.
Damaria Senne

I've done web sites for non-profits and always recommend using WP for my clients. so far, they love the results.
http://twitter.com/1to1Discovery Juli Monroe

I'm not a non-profit, but I use WordPress, and I recommend all my blogging clients use it. Definitely the way to go.

http://johnhaydon.com John Haydon

What kind of folks do you work with?

http://chriscree.tv Chris Cree

Heya John! You are so right. I've worked with some non-profits of various sizes and they all see the same benefits that small businesses see when it comes to WordPress.

Loved the link to the BigUglyWebsite. Made me laugh!

http://johnhaydon.com John Haydon

Thanks, Chris -> for providing the background to this post!

http://frankdickinson.me/ Frank Dickinson

Couldn't function without WordPress.

http://johnhaydon.com John Haydon

I hear ya, Frank. WordPress is like coffee.

http://twitter.com/ReasonDigital Reason Digital

It's important to remember though that WordPress is only a platform to deliver a non-profit's website.

Solid SEO is about more than just friendly URLs and the right plugins – nonprofits need to understand that just installing WordPress and the SEO plugin won't automatically get them to the front page of Google results. Good search results positioning is just as much about interesting, relevant content and inbound links from respected websites.

The Boys' Life website is a remarkable example because it's attractive, audience-focussed and has plenty of interesting, interactive things to do. That's not because of WordPress, it would be just as great website if it were delivered using any Content Management System.

I attend a lot of meetings where philanthropic web techies evangelise about Drupal, WordPress and other free CMSs to nonprofits who expect it to be a magic bullet and still end up disappointed when they receive no more email subscribers, volunteers or donations than their existing, outdated website.

Nonprofits need to be less concerned with what platform will be delivering their website, and more about how they will achieve their aims & objectives and how their website will help them make a real difference to their benefactors and to society in general.

Having said that, your points are absolutely spot-on (as ever) and many thanks for writing a post that focusses on the often ignored nonprofit sector.

http://johnhaydon.com John Haydon

Excellent point here. SEO is more about strategy than the platform. I especially love “Nonprofits need to be… more concerned about how they will… make a real difference to their benefactors and to society in general.”

http://johnhaydon.com John Haydon

I hear ya, Frank. WordPress is like coffee.
Lclay

Actually looking to move my non profit's blog (http://hopecottagepregnancyandadoptioncenter.blogspot.com/) if I can ever find the time!