The World Vision website needs to achieve the overall goals of our organisation and ensure a seamless experience online for our supporters and potential supporters.

In thinking about the parts of the website in which you work, make sure you understand what you're trying to achieve in that part as well as for the website as a whole.

To identify what you're trying to achieve online, start by creating your online goals.

Try this formula:

Website purpose + business objectives + user focus = online goals

The purpose of the website is to drive a supporter to take action!

World Vision wants to make as big a difference in the world as possible. This is only possible with supporter action. What do we mean by action? Actions include both financial and non-financial responses to the issues of poverty and injustice.

Each website visit should result in a greater commitment from the supporter than they'd entered it with. Every page should give supporters an action they can take to react to the content that's just inspired them to help others.

What are your high-level business objectives? Defining these first will help to ensure that the content and functionality we offer to our users online will drive actions that help to meet your objectives.

It might be easier to start with a clear low-level business objective (eg "publicise an event"). Analyse it to find your high-level objective (eg "increased engagement").

Your objective(s) might be:

• increase child sponsorships;
• retain child sponsors;
• increase donations;
• improve our ability to respond to current events, particularly emergencies;
• increase "active citizenship";
• increase audience size; or
• empower an audience to act.

Focusing on our users will help us to meet their needs and ultimately drive online success.

What do our users need from our website?

• They need to understand why they should take action.
• They need to see the difference their actions make.
• They need us to give them the tools to take action.

Marrying together the website's purpose, your business objectives and a user focus will help you to define your online goals. Make sure these goals are SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound).

For example:

website purpose: drive users to take action
+ business objective: increase active citizenship
+ user focus: "I want to feel I can make a difference"
= goal: 10,000 pledges made over a 6-month period by users inspired by field stories

Clear and specific online goals will help to ensure that we provide our users with a great experience and compelling content. Our website will drive action that supports your business objectives.

Keeping your goal in mind as you write will help you to create content that inspires action towards that goal. For example, rather than write "Barriers to accessing hospital care must be reduced" you'll write "Together we can make sure hospital care is for everyone. Here's how..."