Sadly, we can’t personally meet with every member of our target audience, so we heavily depend on the Internet – particularly our website – to both represent us and to amplify our message. You wouldn’t leave the design and development of your site to just anyone and you shouldn’t depend on just anyone to oversee its operation. After all, your website may be responsible for the first and only impression your audience forms of you and your organization.
What you do and say on your site may immediately be seen and recorded. Not only are your supporters watching your site, but so are the media and your competition. In the right hands, the quality of your website content will soar and your communication campaign will progress. In the hands of a volunteer or under-qualified staffer (even if they’re well-intentioned), puts your online campaign headquarters (a.k.a. your website) at risk.
There are several good reasons to carefully select the individual(s) in charge of your organization’s website: Experience, Accountability, and Security.
- Experience
Experienced individuals deliver experienced work. They can quickly identify and decisively execute successful strategies. You are more likely save time, effort, money – and achieve your organization’s objectives – if you put an experienced individual at the helm of your online communication efforts. - Accountability
If someone is being paid by you to do a job, they are accountable to you. It’s difficult to reprimand a volunteer for substandard performance that may include making content mistakes or for not showing up to work. After all, volunteers are working for your organization as a gift. Paying an experienced individual to manage your online profile and communications ensures quality work because you remain in control. - Security
If you provide your website log in and passwords to a ever growing circle of staff members then grant them management privileges, you are likely to not only have less effective online communication, but you put your organization at risk of a security breach. The more people that can log in and tinker with your site, the greater the odds that your communication strategy plan veers off course, content quality control suffers, or worse, a careless employee stores password information where it can be obtained by people outside of the organization. TIP: Any time an employee who had management access to your site leaves your organization, be sure to revoke their privileges after their departure, then assign new passwords to your site.
Far too many organizations have fallen in the trap of treating their online communication as an afterthought. They seem to forget that it’s their online communication that’s seen each day by their audience. The choice of which individual to put in control of that online communication is worth careful consideration.