Budgeting an Association Website Project

Planning and budgeting for an association website project is a complex task that requires careful consideration of various factors, including the purpose of the website, the target audience, the desired features, and the available budget. Ad Telic has extensive experience in guiding successful association website projects. This guide is based on 15 years of working with associations and over 200 completed projects ranging from 30K to well over a million dollars. This comprehensive guide will walk you through the key steps in planning and budgeting for your association’s website project.

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1. Define the Purpose and Objectives

Understanding the Purpose:

Communication Tool: For member updates, news, and announcements.
Membership Management: Features like registration, renewals, and profile management.
Event Planning: Online registration and information for conferences and seminars.
Resource Hub: Providing members with access to research, articles, and other materials.
Social Network: Members-only features for networking, directories, communication, and planning.

We strongly believed in starting every project with an Organizing Idea. Capturing the project charter and creating a mantra helps keep priorities clear. In most digital engagements the most difficult times come from change management, not technology. Therefore, having a clear, concise, vision statement and aligned goals helps keep people on track, and priorities clear.

Setting Clear Objectives for Budgeting an Association Website Project:

Engagement Goals: Increase member engagement by a certain percentage.
Membership Growth: Target new member sign-ups.
User Experience: Improve navigation and accessibility.
Marketing Engine: For many associations, the website is engine-driving member engagement.

Pairing stated goals with a strong vision creates better alignment. Answering “why” with a goal helps those not directly involved in the project understand the scope of the project. In our experience, associations are often siloed organizations of departments like membership, marketing, sales, education, policy, and advocacy. Vision and goals alignment helps everyone across siloes understand why change is happening and what it means for them. In our experience the budget for discovery and vision starts around 15% of your overall budget but can be as much as 30%.

2. Identify the Target Audience

Members’ Needs and Preferences: Survey members to understand their expectations.
Accessibility Requirements: Ensure the website is accessible to all members, including those with disabilities.
Demographic Considerations: Tailor the website to cater to the demographic profile of the majority of future members.

Many associations regularly conduct membership surveys, but few engage members on digital projects. We recommend association user research include internal and external (members) users. How many people you include depends on the scope of your project and membership. In every engagement where we have engaged with members, we are blown away by the depth of insight they provide. Your members know what you are doing well, what they value, and where you need to improve.

3. Determine the Required Features

Essential Features: Membership management, event registration, news updates, self-service portals, e-commerce.
Additional Features: Blog, forums, job boards, donation portals.
Integration Needs: CRM systems, payment gateways, email marketing tools.

Prioritizing features is a skill set. So keep in mind this step is easier said than done. But also remember that “shopping while hungry” leads to adding a lot of unprioritized items to the cart. We often see requirements listings with hundreds of requirements. You will save yourself a lot of time and money if you take the time to work with your partner of choice on prioritizing your requirements in a forced order of priority with a value, and cost estimate.

Some common big-ticket items we see are accessibility considerations and security considerations. For example, “bank-level security.” Or “full WCAG compliance.” These terms are nuanced and require digging into. WCAG for example comes in A, AA, AAA, flavors. WCAG is a guideline by definition and not a “compliance” item. However, if you want to demonstrate that the guidelines are fully met it requires extensive testing. If you require “compliance” this typically suggests you have had a legal issue and will also need a third party to “sign off” on the work, therefore assuming the risk involved in further legal issues.

Note: requiring that your new association website design fully meet WCAG AA specifications can easily add 30% to your design, front-end development, and testing budget. A responsible web developer will also recommend you get a third party to “sign-off” on the WCAG features to cover liability.

4. Choose the Right Platform

Content Management Systems (CMS): WordPress, Umbraco, Optimizely, Sitecore
Custom Development: When off-the-shelf CMS doesn’t meet specific needs.
Cost Implications: Custom development typically requires a higher budget.

The signal-to-noise ratio on CMS selection is extremely high noise. Every CMS vendor will claim their CMS is the best. Sorting this out can be a chore for an association. A consultancy like Ad Telic that is independent and agnostic can help you choose the right CMS. But keep in mind a CMS like WordPress or Umbraco that is open-source and “Free” will have costs associated with bringing it up to the level of DXP via managed hosting and best-of-breed add-ons. While an enterprise option like Optimizely or Sitecore will easily cost your organization 100K plus in yearly subscriptions. When considering what CMS your association needs consider your yearly budget, your feature requirements, and the size of your team. With Optimizely for example, to fully utilize its feature set you need at minimum a 5 to 10-person team.

Note: Sitecore is the most expensive option, Optimizely costs at least 85 to 100K a year in subscriptions, and Umbraco Cloud and WordPress are more affordable to get started but scaling will cost you. Scaling Umbraco is very doable but becomes harder to price up-front. You will need to be specific with your web design agency on what you require to scale. In either case it is not unusual to spend 3 to 6K a month to manage and host a scaled enterprise site on Umbraco, Drupal, or WordPress.

5. Design Considerations

Branding: Align the website design with the association’s brand identity.
User Experience (UX): Ensure a seamless and intuitive user journey.
Responsive Web Design: Optimize for mobile and tablet viewing.

Design execution is a key component of a successful technology deployment. You don’t want to end up with “fresh lipstick on a new pig.” In our experience design, branding, and UX considerations can easily be 20-30% of your overall project spend. Design is very nuanced and we will save a more in-depth consideration of the ins and outs of good design for association sites for another day. See our straightforward guide on designing websites for associations.

Some key considerations for an association web design project:

Responsive Design
Full Screen, Edge to Edge Design (no more boxed-width design in 2024)
Template or accelerator disclosure (we have seen so many bad templates and accelerators used as an upsell or value add when in fact what you are getting is an outdated theme that your competitors are also using)
Information Architecture

6. Content Development

Content Strategy: Plan for creating, managing, and updating content.
Copywriting Costs: Budget for professional copywriting services.
Content Migration: Moving thousands of pages of content is a huge task, consider who will do this work.
Multimedia Content: Include images, videos, and infographics.

Content strategy and content migration are often required in larger engagements. Remember to clarify with your technology partner who is responsible for content migration. Most often content migration will fall to your association staff. Content strategy should cover the full content life cycle from planning to content retirement. You may need a content audit to establish scope. Be clear with your agency partner about roles and responsibilities when it comes to content development, migration, and population. In our opinion it often is most cost effective to have your staff manage content population as agencies will charge an hourly rate typically in the 100 to 200 dollars an hour range. Also, in most cases your staff will manage the site and content population is a great way to learn how the new system works. We would recommend you allocate your budget on training your staff rather than spending it with an agency.

7. Security and Compliance

Data Protection: Ensure compliance with data privacy laws (e.g., CAN-SPAM, GDPR).
Security Measures: Implement SSL certificates, firewalls like WAF, and regular security audits.
Performance: Include caching, headers expiry, image CDN, and page speed optimization.

We recommend including page speed performance and basic site optimization as part of your initial scope. What good is a brand-new association website if it is slow? Your technology partner should include basics like setting up caching and header expiry but too often these items are “forgotten.”

8. Hosting and Maintenance

Hosting Solutions: Shared, dedicated, or cloud hosting.
Maintenance Plan: Regular updates, backups, and technical support.
Costs: Consider both initial and ongoing hosting and maintenance fees.

While “shared hosting” is available on the market we would never recommend it for an association website. We carefully select our hosting partners and in 2023 there are only a handful that meet our expectations. All of them host on Google, Amazon, or Azure. All of them provide security considerations like a web application firewall and performance considerations like a CDN. The days of rolling your own hosting are done and gone. Cloud hosting is the norm and your association website should be hosted in the cloud.

9. Marketing Automation and SEO

SEO Strategy: Optimize search engines to improve visibility.
Social Media Integration: Enhance engagement through social media platforms.
Email Marketing: Integrate with email platforms for member communication.

While there’s a handful of CMSs and DXPs that will handle some degree of email we think it is important to consider third-party email providers as well. Marketing automation for an association website is often mixed into website engagement. We believe they can be married projects but the technology stack should get its assessment. What we do not recommend is using your association management system or AMS for marketing automation. AMSs are asked to do a lot of things including email. But none of them do it well. So consider platforms like Marketo, Hubspot, or Eloqua. The goal is to send highly targeted, personalized, segmented, multi-variate-tested emails to your members. Your members should be able to configure topics of interest, email cadence (daily, weekly, monthly), and more. “Email blasting” as a practice needs to end, it is our number one most common member complaint.

As for SEO, the majority of RFPs we have seen mention SEO with very few details. “We require SEO.” Great, but in many cases this is poorly defined, and quickly forgotten in the budgeting process. If you require SEO be specific about what on-page, technical, or on-going SEO management you require. Do not expect your web designer to SEO your site. See the section about content population: most content population will be done by your staff. That is, your staff will have the most impact on-page SEO. We recommend you budget for technical SEO primarily. For example, clearly define if you require a multilingual site, a multisite implementation, schema markup, page speed requirements, image optimization (for example webp). The key here is to separate what a good web developer should include in a site build from what on-going SEO looks like.

10. Budgeting an Association Website Project

Initial Costs: Development, project management, testing, quality assurance, design, content creation, and hosting setup.
Ongoing Costs: Maintenance, hosting fees, content updates, marketing.
Contingency Fund: Allocate a portion of the budget for unexpected costs.

We recommend planning on a bare minimum of 20% of your initial spend on maintenance every year. This amount will not allow for “continuous improvement” but it will keep the lights on. For associations pursuing digital transformation, this percentage could be as much as 100% year over year spent on ongoing improvement and agile, iterative releases. The most successful association websites consider ongoing improvement a key component of an overall digital strategy. There is no “set it and forget it” with digital. All the major platforms including WordPress, Umbraco, and Optimizely, are continuously releasing bug fixes, improvements, and new features. So consider the cadence at which you will need to adopt those changes and plan on spending money to keep up.

11. Timeline and Project Management

Project Timeline: Establish a realistic timeline for the project.
Milestones: Set key milestones for design, development, testing, and launch.
Project Manager: Appoint someone to oversee the project and keep it on track.

12. Vendor Selection and Management

Choosing a Vendor: Assess portfolios, reviews and references, and pricing.
Contracts and Agreements: Ensure clear terms and deliverables.
Communication Plan: Regular meetings and updates.

13. Testing and Launch

Quality Assurance: Conduct thorough testing for bugs and usability issues.
Soft Launch: Release the website to a limited audience for feedback.
Official Launch: Announce the launch to all members and stakeholders.

14. Post-Launch Analysis and Feedback

User Feedback: Collect and analyze member feedback for improvements.
Performance Metrics: Monitor website analytics to gauge performance.
Continuous Improvement: Plan for regular updates and enhancements.

15. Training and Support

Staff Training: Ensure staff are trained to manage and update the website.
Member Support: Provide support for members in using the website.

Many RFPs include mentions of training and support but the devil is in the details. In our opinion, this is best addressed as a separate engagement. But be sure to dig into what resources each vendor and platform can provide. WordPress for example has extensive documentation online and thousands of tutorials online, while Optimizely does have technical docs there are relatively few tutorials online and they charge for additional training in many cases. So consider where your platform enablement is coming from. We recommend that associations negotiate training and resources as part of the initial spend as many platform vendors are more likely to negotiate training when selling the platform subscription. After the initial sale is closed vendors tend to clam up and “follow standard practices” rather than think outside the box and seek exceptions to close a deal.