Revamping Nonprofit Health Websites with Kyle Taylor

In this episode of Health Nonprofit Digital Marketing, we dive into the intricacies of redesigning nonprofit health websites with Kyle Taylor of NASTAD, a nonprofit that represents public health officials who administer HIV and hepatitis programs in the U.S. Join Spencer Brooks and Kyle as they discuss the challenges and opportunities in reorganizing content, improving accessibility, and aligning websites with an organization’s evolving vision. Discover the importance of involving all stakeholders and planning for long-term growth in your digital marketing endeavors.

About the guest

Kyle Taylor is the director of communications for NASTAD, a nonprofit association that works to end the HIV/AIDS and hepatitis epidemics in the United States. He leads NASTAD’s five-person communications team and directs all of the organization’s internal and external communications, including its website, social media, newsletters, and media outreach. Kyle has more than a decade of experience working in communications for public health focused nonprofits and has led the development of two websites for national nonprofits. 

Resources

• Non Profit Technology Conference by NTEN: https://www.nten.org/gather
• Progressive Communicators of Washington DC: https://medium.com/progressive-communicators-of-washington-d-c

Contact Kyle

• https://nastad.org/
• ktaylor@NASTAD.org

Full Transcript

00:04

Welcome to Health Nonprofit Digital Marketing, a podcast for nonprofit marketers in the health space. Join us as we discuss how to use the web to drive awareness, engagement and action for health causes. This podcast is part of the thought education of Brooks digital, the web agency for health nonprofits. Now, here’s your host, Spencer Brooks.

Spencer Brooks 00:26

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Health Nonprofit Digital Marketing. My name as always is Spencer and today I’m joined by Kyle Taylor. Now Kyle is the director of communications for NASTAD, which is a nonprofit association that works to end the HIV AIDS and hepatitis epidemics in the United States. He leads NASTAD five person communications team and directs all of the organization’s internal and external communications, including its websites, social media, newsletters, and media outreach. Kyle has more than a decade of experience working in communications for public health focused nonprofits and has led the development of two websites as well for national nonprofits. So, Kyle, first of all, as always, thanks for coming on the show. Really excited to have you today, because we’re going to talk about website redesigns, which is a personal favorite topic of mine. I love talking about this. So maybe to kick us off, Kyle, would you mind sharing, maybe a specific instance from your career where you’re faced with this? That daunting, overwhelming task of Oh, no, I have to be in charge and lead a website redesign. Like, where were you? What was going through your mind? What started it? Could you, could you share a little bit more about that?

Kyle Taylor 01:44

Yeah, sure. And first, thanks for having me here. Spencer. So, I think the one that comes to mind for me is actually at NASTAD where I’m currently working, when we realized that the website that we had, that I inherited when I came into the role was built on a version of Drupal that was going to go out of date. And so we were talking to the web developer that we work with, and found out that we had, basically, I think it was about eight months at the time to, we were either going to have to rebuild the website, exactly in the shape that it was in or decide to go for a whole redesign. And so that’s why I decided to take the opportunity to say like, well, we know we have a lot of problems with the current website and have received a lot of feedback that it could be improved, so why don’t we take this opportunity, since we’re going to have to rebuild it anyway, to just go ahead and redesign it as well. So it was, you know, it wasn’t as a rush of a process since we had almost a full calendar year. But it was, it was a bit of a daunting task, because we’re just, we’re a small team at NASTAD that and we always have something going on that we’re working on and so then having to rebuild and redesign the website on top of that was, just we knew it was going to be a big project for us. But you know, in the end, I think we came out with a with a much better product and a website that really works well for our users. And we’ve seen traffic increase dramatically since we relaunched the new website, and we just get a lot of feedback from our members and people who come to the website, they say it’s much easier to work with and much easier to find what they’re looking for when they’re there.

Spencer Brooks 03:32

Yeah, you know, it’s funny, I started my career actually, I don’t know, if you I probably didn’t share this with you, Kyle, or maybe with listeners as well, actually started my career as a Drupal developer, believe it or not, so you mentioned Drupal and my ears perk up. Because it’s sort of been like, you know, it’s been my happy place for about 15 years, although I haven’t written code in a number of years now. Yeah, I know exactly what you’re talking about right, where, you know, I think it was what Drupal version seven or something like that was the was the version that was going out of date. And you either had to rebuild your site or just, you know, keep it and, you know, there’s no security updates anymore, right. So yet, so yeah, that was, I know exactly what you’re talking about. And I’m curious, Kyle, like, what were the other obviously, the outdated version of Drupal was the main instigator that made you think well, okay, we’re, our hand is now forced in a way to do this. But you mentioned some other problems and things that you noticed that contributed to your decision to not just rebuild the same thing, like, you know, pixel for pixel on a new version of Drupal, right, you know, a new set of internal parts, but rather, you take the opportunity to rethink from the ground up. So, what maybe what were the challenges and the other issues that you were noticing that led to you saying, let’s just redo the whole thing?

Kyle Taylor 04:53

Yeah. So the way that the website was structured, really was, it was structured in a way that NASTAD outgrew it fast. And so the navigation on the website, the way it would work is if you were looking for a particular resource, the way it was all sorted was through our programmatic teams at NASTAD. And at the time, we had five domestic program teams and one global team. And so when you would hover over the navigation on the website, what would drop down was a menu, six columns for all the different teams. And then from there, you would have to, say, for example, you were looking for a resource in HIV, a drug that’s a really kind of important tool to end the epidemics right now is PrEP. And if you wanted to just go to NASTAD’s website and learn more about PrEP, you would have needed to know that the team that primarily is publishing resources on PrEP is NASTAD’s health systems integration team, and then you would need to go to their page. And then the resources on that page, factsheets, webinars, things like that were included in columns in a block on the page that was sorted, and it had to be sorted, we didn’t have a choice by this by how recently was published. So, if you were looking for something that was like maybe six months old, it would be so buried under new material that it would be impossible to find. And then the other issue with the navigation being really focused on the team structure for the organization is that drop down, that I mentioned earlier, when it was six columns? Well, we added a seven program team, but it was impossible to add them to that drop down column. So, we had to work with our developer to add a second layer underneath it, where only one team was kind of floating by itself. And so it was just it was a lot of issues like that, that were cropping up that I think at the time when the website was published, it was like a big improvement over the version before that, but it was just, you know, the organization was growing. And you know, we were having a really hard time figuring out how to sort things in a way that was just kind of natural for somebody coming to a web page to look for information, like I think, you know, you don’t really necessarily, when you go to an organization’s website, think you need to kind of like take a look at their org chart to kind of figure out how you’re going to find the information you’re looking for.

Spencer Brooks 07:19

Yeah, oh, totally. And it’s funny, you I think you hit the nail on the head on two problems that I see over and over and over and over again, on nonprofit websites, right. The first is that the, the organization of the site often mirrors the org chart. And the second being over time, maybe the structure and whether that’s program structure or initiatives or even the mission of the nonprofit changes. But, you know, whenever I think a website is created, there has to be, it’s an organization of information, right, and their systems on the back end of the site, the way that you structure, you know, all of the types of content and all these things sort of have to be make assumptions about the mission of the organization, the current structure, right, and then over time it that those things change, so I think that you totally, you hit the nail on the head on both of those problems. I’m curious, Kyle, why do you think it’s so common that the navigation of a lot of nonprofit websites just seemed to be either a program structure, team structure, something that is a little more internal, do you, I mean, do you have any thoughts on that? Do you have any earliest hypotheses on why that might be?

Kyle Taylor 08:35

Yeah, and, you know, I think in my experience working for national nonprofits, public health nonprofits that have always, everywhere I’ve worked has had a lot of funding from the federal government for the program side of things. And the way that that just kind of ends up internally building some silos where it’s like, you know, one team has kind of the, the money from a cooperative agreement with the federal government to create their resources, and then they kind of end up in a silo. And, you know, another team could be making resources on like, similar topics, but it comes from a different funding source. So like, internally, we kind of think about it as its own bucket of work. And I think one of the thing that we’ve been trying to do at NASA too is kind of like break down some of our internal silos between our program teams and have them communicating better and I think, like, that’s what I’ve seen where I’ve worked that like some of these internal silos just kind of end up getting reflected on the organization’s public facing website, because, you know, that’s the way we think about the work. You know, it’s what the healthcare access team is doing, not necessarily like something that we could come up with some kind of new categorization to make it easier and work across the organization. So, I think that’s been kind of what I’ve seen, at least in my career and in the particular kind of organizations that I’ve worked at as to that.

Spencer Brooks 09:59

Yeah. This is super great point, right because I do think, yeah, naturally, if you’re trying to present your work to the outside world, then you are going to, to think about it in terms of the buckets that happen internally, that yeah, as you mentioned, get created by all those all those silos. And so I’m curious now on when you approach this problem in the new site, what steps did you take to try to correct that to make it easier for maybe a visitor who has no knowledge whatsoever of any of the programs structure or the org structure that NASTAD that has. How does that person then get to the resources that they might be looking for on the new site? How do you go about tackling that challenge?

Kyle Taylor 10:46

Yeah, well, what we decided to do was really, take the kind of organizing structure for the website, which in the previous version was really NASTAD’s internal teams. And what we decided to do was, we still have team pages on the website. But what we wanted to do is we wanted to have the ability to kind of go broader than that. So what we did is we introduced a new category of content on the website, which we call Issues, it was basically a way to just tag resources or content, blog posts, webinars, anything beyond just the which team produced it, but also to say, you know, what category what kind of information is this, like, like I mentioned prep, if you’re looking for PrEP, we have a tag for that, if you’re looking for our health equity resources, we have a tag for that, if you’re looking for information about policy, Legislative Affairs, we have tags for that. And it’s really kind of been helpful, because it allows us to, it allows us to actually even include content in multiple places, not just not just like, you know, this team produced it, this is where this resource lives, but like through using these tags, we can have resources show up on multiple team pages, we could have them be found just by searching for a particular issue if you wanted to just get a list of resources through that issue. And it’s also allowed us to grow to where we didn’t have that ability before to add easily new teams or new issues like that, just this week, we’re adding two new issues to our list of tags that we have on the website to hopefully make content even easier to find. And it’s, uh, it was something we talked to our web developer about too like, just throughout the whole process is that, you know, we wanted to be sure that this website that we didn’t end up in the same kind of situation that we found with the previous one where we felt like we were kind of stuck. And we’re kind of struggling to find ways to add new content to the website. So, I think that was something too, that we wanted to be sure that we did is put that as like maybe very close to the top as our one of our goals for the new website to be sure that we could the website could grow with NASTAD.

Spencer Brooks 12:56

Yeah, yeah, totally. That makes a ton of sense. I found that there, when you’re in a situation like that, right, there’s kind of two spectrums. One is the where you came from, which is we’re kind of locked into this structure, and we don’t have any options whatsoever, right, we’re very restricted. And then maybe on the other end of the spectrum is, man, we have so many options that we’re swimming, like in the backend of the site, there’s so many ways to configure this and so many different, you know, buttons and features and stuff, that we’re overwhelmed, and we don’t know how to use it. I’ve seen both of those things. And so, do you have thoughts on this, how to balance that in the middle, right? So that you’re, you have a website that is flexible, but isn’t suddenly like you know, you’re driving, you go from riding a bike driving a Ferrari that has so much power that you have, like, you can’t even really utilize it, or it’s so overwhelming. How do you think about trying to manage that spectrum and land on what’s right for your organization?

Kyle Taylor 14:09

Yeah, and I mean, that’s something that too, that we ran into between the two websites and NASTAD you know, in the previous version, I think one of the ways that we had built into the previous version of the website to help try to get closer to where we are now currently with the website is we did have hashtags for content that way, you know, like on Twitter and social, other social media platforms, it worked basically the exact same way with like a pound sign, and then you could put whatever you needed to put there. And that was would be like one of the ways to kind of tie content across the site together. But what I had found by the time I was at NASTAD was that I think we almost went too far in the opposite direction where there were hundreds of these tags on the back end of the website whenever you were building a blog post or a resource, there were so many to go through. And the kind of the policy was to try to just like add as many tags as you could to any piece of content that you were adding to the website. But in practice, what that meant is, anytime you would click on any one of them, it would probably only pull up one piece of content, it wasn’t contained enough to actually make it be a useful resource. And so that’s why what we’ve tried to do, the current version of the website is just be really mindful about that. And try to really think, like, if we’re thinking like, okay, it feels like we’re publishing a lot of resources and blogs on this new topic that we don’t really have a tag for, maybe it’s time we think about it, but we don’t like rush to add them right away, we spent some time thinking about it. We talked to some of our colleagues on program teams and see is this an emerging topic in the field, and then even from there, they’re not just, they’re not just like tags anymore, it’s like we have to when we create an issue on the website, we create a landing page for that issue. So, we draft some introduction text for the page and gather all the resources there and try to have it grow that way. So that way, we’re just generally trying to not rush into things and overcomplicate the website for our users, and even for ourselves for my team building things out.

Spencer Brooks 16:26

Yeah, you know, one of the things that I’ve seen over the years, you know, you got me thinking with that comment about tagging and stuff, right, where, you know, you don’t want to do too little or too much, right, or think strategically and be very intentional about it, which I totally agree with, by the way. I’ve seen instances where it might be that over time, like the initial team that was involved in the website redesign gets that, because they were a part of the project, they have the context, they understand, oh, man, this is how it went wrong in the past, or this is an issue that we’re dealing with. So now we’re doing it this way, we’re being intentional about the tags that we’re doing that, but then a year or two years go by or whatever, a few people get added to the team. And then all of a sudden, they don’t know that or they don’t they’re like, why are we tagging it this way? Or should we even be adding tags or things like that? So how do you approach? Maybe it’s the topic of training, maybe it’s the topic of, you know, I don’t know, just organizational knowledge. But how are you thinking about this going forward to ensure that the existing team members or maybe new team members are all pulling in the same direction and understand the reasons why you’re doing that? And practically how to do it?

Kyle Taylor 17:48

Yeah, yeah. And this is something to where I think that I did, we did have a good system in place before, even with the previous website. And then we wanted to build on that leading into the new one which is just a website documentation manual, that really kind of goes through the current version of it, it goes through all the different components, all the different kinds of content we have on the website, and what our procedures are for, even down to like how we name files before we upload them on the website to make our file system easy to search for things to like the PDFs and the images on the back end that was also something that really needed to be updated in the new version of the website. So we did we worked that was also a deliverable from our web developer with the website wasn’t just the website itself, but was this manual that we’ve been adding to as we add new components to the website, or we, if we modify the way we do anything, or also, a big part of that, too, is accessibility and making sure that the website is accessible and that we’re following best practices there. And so that’s just another thing that we’ve been sure to build into with my team, when if we add a new member to the communications team, that we make sure that we spend a lot of time kind of going through that manual and explaining why we do things. And I think it’s been really helpful.

Spencer Brooks 19:10

I think it’s such a good practice to be able to do that, to be honest, because when you said it, I was really glad that you mentioned it, because having that documentation, I mean, my personal opinion, it’s invaluable for the ongoing use of the site, but it’s also unfortunately, one of the first things that gets cut. And I know this from being on the side of a, you know, an agency. And also talking with other agencies it’s usually the first thing that gets cut. If there’s like not enough budget, or if you’re doing like a competitive bidding process and an RFB is a lot of that stuff tends to get stripped out, which I think is really, it’s tough, because I think all of us know on the agency side that a lot of these things that are like, Hey, we’re going to help you with your content. We’re going to help you, you know, with providing documentation and training it’s really hard to, it’s hard to include that when there’s, you know, this competitive process. I digress. But you mentioned accessibility, Kyle, which is one of the things I wanted to ask you about. Obviously, accessibility is a pretty big concern for most nonprofits, I think especially those who are in any sort of health or health care related space. So, could you talk to me and listeners a little bit about how you approached accessibility on your latest site redesign or maybe on earlier ones, too, and the steps you’ve taken to make the site accessible?

Kyle Taylor 20:35

Yeah. And that was another big thing that we made sure that we included in our request for proposals for this website is that we wanted to have an accessibility audit be part of the review of the website and recommendations on how to improve it for the new one. And we did find some issues, even going all the way to NASTADs color palette at the time was really, a lot of the colors were lighter before this rebuild of the website. And what it led to was our web developer found that it was failing accessibility tests for color contrast for text on some pages for like the hyperlinks and some of the colors that we were using on some of the sub pages of the website. So, we almost had to even go into what we called like a soft rebrand for the organization and had our designer create a new color palette for us to that darkened a lot of the colors and made sure that those contrasts, the color contrast with pass an accessibility reader on the website. The other thing that we did that we had on the previous website for any image or things like that, that we were uploading to the website, we had a field for alt text there, but it wasn’t required. So, it was like really easy to just plug an image into the website and then upload it without adding alt text to describe what that image is. And we decided to make that a required field now you can’t upload an image into our website on the back end without adding some alt text in there to describe to somebody who’s using a screen reader what’s being displayed on the page. And that was really important to us too. Because I feel like it kind of goes back to the training element we were talking about, like, you know, you can always tell people and emphasize the importance of accessibility and making sure that you’re filling in things like all text but sometimes you’re just working really, really fast trying to get these pages up on a deadline. And it could be really easy if it’s just the field there, that’s not required for you to fill out to, even accidentally just miss that and upload an image to the website that way. So those are two of the big things that we wanted to focus on to improve accessibility in our website. And it’s also something that we’re interested in continuing to build off of, we’ve been talking about in this year in 2024, trying to have a third party also do another accessibility review of a website and see we can come up with a list of any other recommendations we can do to improve that and bring that back to our web developer to work on those.

Spencer Brooks 22:58

Yeah. Yeah, I love both of those things that you mentioned. Like I think, yeah, color contrast. And even the little nitty gritty details, like alt text is the, you know, whenever at least I’m looking at, like, different accessibility reports on sites. It’s usually like, yes, there are some egregious things sometimes. But most of if you look at the actual volume, it’s like missing alt text, missing alt text, right. Of course, you know, everyone knows that nonprofit, like, we’re all just doing our best to get things done in like a timely manner, while you know, juggling 500 other things. And so, if you don’t have to fill out the alt text field, you just aren’t going to fill it out, you know. And so making it required, it’s just like, it’s such a small thing, but it’s it forces that best practice. And so yeah, I love that. I also, I wanted to ask you, Kyle, about another topic here, which is the getting, the involvement of staff and stakeholders and everyone in your organization, when it comes to a website redesign project, I find that there’s this tension here, again, we’re talking about spectrums between, on one hand, you could just unilaterally make all the decisions, you know, maybe as the point person on the project, not really involve everyone else. And you know, by golly, you’re going to work really fast, because you don’t have to involve anyone, you can just make a decision and go, which is quite efficient, right? You can get a project done more quickly that way. But of course, at obvious expense of you know, the needs of the entire organization, where on the other hand, you might have, you know, where I’m going to go and we’re going to I’m going to talk to everyone in this organization, or we’re going to form a massive committee and have to get, you know, approval on every single little decision about the site. And you know, which turns a project into a multi year marathon sometimes. So, I’m curious how you approached organizational involvement, involvement of your staff, involvement of stakeholders to sort of balance the need for input from other people while also realizing that we have a timeline to keep as well. And so, we can’t always have consensus, we can’t always ask everyone about every question, how did you handle that?

Kyle Taylor 25:19

Yeah, what we tried to do was really build steps into the process for the website, making sure that we were getting feedback from my colleagues on the program teams. And I think even kind of like, before, we were launching the website, my team, we really just try to make sure that we’re always listening to feedback. So, like a lot of what we were expecting to hear from our program staff, like I think we already knew, because we had been hearing it and when we’ve been documenting it, and we’ve been upfront about, you know, we can’t make this change to the website now. But someday, maybe when we’re able to rebuild it, we’ll be able to incorporate this in there. And I think that was really helpful, kind of like laying the groundwork leading up to the rebuild itself. But then, when it was time to rebuild it, you know, we were very clear with our full staff, which is about 60 people at the time that you know, here’s the timeline, here’s the process. And here are the different points where we’re going to reach out to you for your feedback. And it was, we opened it up even, it worked out well for us. But I could see this maybe being opening up a can of worms. But even when we got the initial kind of like three design concepts, we during an all staff meeting, kind of walked through them and explained why we were structuring the website and the way we were planning to structure it and why we made certain decisions and then took feedback from staff and modified those concepts into what we ended up with. So, we wanted to make sure that everybody felt like they had a chance at some point to provide some feedback, or even just like take a look at and say like this looks like it will be a great improvement. And I think it really helped us in the end, when we launched the website to have a product that everybody was excited about. I think the other thing to your point about how this can really, trying to get out feedback from everybody can delay things. No, we definitely did run into some situations where we were getting suggestions for features for the website that we just we didn’t have in the timeline to be able to like implement those before we wanted to launch the website, which was going to be in December of 2022. We had to get it launched, you know before Drupal seven phased, not 2022, sorry, December 2020, we had to get a lunch before Drupal phased out. And then we also had to be sure that we were just like needed to get it done in the calendar year. Because these are the contracts that we had in place with our developer and our designer. But what we did to was keep a list of like what we call like 2.0 for the website. So, we have a list of features that we weren’t able to implement at launch, that we had a plan in the next year that we were going to be able to go in and add those. And I think that’s been a helpful thing to make sure that people, we were able to let people on staff know that, like, we heard their feedback, and we’re going to try to implement it at some point in the future, even if it’s not going to be a feature that’s available at launch.

Spencer Brooks 28:26

Is that I think that is, you hit the nail on the head again with that, because the idea of a 2.0 list is I think is really honoring to everyone who’s involved in that project and is giving their feedback because, you know, they might actually be something legitimate and might be something good and being able to say, yes, we can do that. But we can’t do it now is much better and easier, I think to hear than just flat out no, sorry, we’re not gonna do that. And so, it’s something that I like I know that we will use on our projects to at Brooks Digital’s just like there’s that’s always the case of the website project. I don’t think I’ve ever either been a part of one or you know, been a part of a building a project that didn’t have things that came up during the project, ideas, stuff like that, that we could do right then there’s always stuff that comes up that has to be saved until the end. So, I think it just makes a ton of sense to have that list. And then because you know a website isn’t you know, something that’s set in stone like you can you kind of always follow up in the next year and add whatever you want.

Kyle Taylor 29:34

Yeah exactly.

Spencer Brooks 29:35

Which I guess actually leads me into my next question for you, Kyle, which is just the idea of actually improving a site over time, right? Because I know that obviously websites like I mentioned are dynamic, and they need to adapt to an organization’s needs over time. So how do you approach evolving your site over time?

Kyle Taylor 29:57

Yeah, I mean, the 2.0 list is kind of our guide there for evolving the website, you know, we take a look at some of the features that were recommended at launch that we weren’t able to add. But then also, we get requests from team members every now and then about can we do this on the website? And sometimes the answer is, you know, No, not right now. But actually, let’s explore that maybe that’s useful thing to add. And I think we also try to think about it as is this something that could be added to the website that could be useful, not just for the person requesting it, but across teams, like if we’re going to add, one of the things we’re thinking about adding right now actually is like a photo library to the website. And if we do that, you know, just not just for the team that’s requesting it, but it’s like, how can we make sure that everybody else on staff knows that this is now open to them to think about for their pages, if they want to add it there? The other thing that we tried to do is keep a close eye on our partners, similar organizations to NASTAD and see if they’re doing anything really interesting with their websites and if so if we can reach out to them and talk to their communications team to see if how it’s working out for them. And if it’s something that we might want to consider adding to our webpage?

Spencer Brooks 31:19

That’s an awesome idea. I hadn’t, I hadn’t considered actually the idea before of just doing that direct outreach, I think that’s a great tip. So Kyle, I am, I had a couple questions I wanted to ask you here kind of moving into the time in the interview, where asked some of the standardized questions I like to ask every guest, and the first of which is, what’s one thing in digital you’re working on right now that is consuming a lot of your brain space? And what takeaways could you share with listeners who might be encountering that same challenge?

Kyle Taylor 31:51

So, something we’re thinking about, not necessarily related to the website, but I think they would have some utility there. But we, you know, we’re just really kind of interested, as I’m sure you are in some of these AI models that are out there, and how NASTAD could take advantage of those and the features that they add, so, we’ve been talking to a couple of potential partners to think about building out things like, like a chatbot, for NASTAD that we’d be able to take a look at, like, we would be able to feed into it like our PDFs or reports, or technical assistance requests and even information from our website, to be able to help make things a little easier to find and help my team in particularly, the communications team look at some kind of like marketing, pulling marketing language or helping us with like press releases to draft those quicker when we have things that come up rapidly. And I just feel like this is such a new field. And it’s going to be growing fast that I think you know, nonprofits, I think we should really kind of try to think about how we could use these resources, because I think there’s going to be like a pretty rapid amount of growth here.

Spencer Brooks 33:08

Yeah, you’re not the first person to share that with me, I think this seems like the year like something about 2024, like people hit the ground, like it’s a new year, you know, new, like new goals or you know, maybe even a strategic plan, and this like AI, the threats and opportunities that it presents, it seems to be at the forefront of everyone’s mind. And so, thank you for sharing that. Kyle, I also wanted to ask you what are two or three resources that you regularly use to keep up on news and trends in your work.

Kyle Taylor 33:37

So, I and my staff, we always try to attend the nonprofit technology conference every year, and our members of NTEN, the group that puts that conference on and I think it’s just it’s been a really great, I’ve attended it for a few years now. It’s been a great way to meet developers and other communications professionals and keep on top of the trends every year, that are talked about at the conference itself. The other thing too, that I these are maybe a little more DC focused since NASTAD is in Washington, DC, but there’s a several listservs that I’m on, like the progressive communicators of Washington DC or progressive exchange, that they’re just like really great, you know, for talking about emerging trends in the communications field, and will often have a lot of information that’s really helpful in particular for nonprofits. I think both conferences and these like listservs have always been really helpful to me in my career, because the communication staff at a lot of national nonprofits is small. There’s not a lot of communications professionals, at least at the organizations that I’ve worked at. So it’s been a really helpful way to kind of just stay in touch with peers doing similar work at other organizations.

Spencer Brooks 34:55

Love that. Yeah, I can all about for the NTC conference, the one put on by NTEN too, I’ve gone to that before always loved it. In fact, I think I’ll be there this year, it’s like in my backyard in Portland. So, I can drive down, like the conference centers like 20 minutes from my house, I would, it’d be silly of me not to go. So, you know, Kyle, if you or if anyone else listening, if you’re planning on being at the conference, I’m recording this, you know, in mid February, so actually, you know, may not go live until after the conference, but in case this does, you know, feel free to shoot me a message. I always love to meet anyone who’s listening. But Kyle, I only have one more question for you, which is, how can listeners get in touch with you if they’d like to learn more about your work?

Kyle Taylor 35:44

Yeah, our website is nastad.org – www.nastad.org And my contact information is available on the website. And yeah, if anyone has any questions about a website rebuild, or anything that NASTAD does, I’d be happy to chat.

Spencer Brooks 36:02

Wonderful. Well, that wraps up our show for today. If you liked this, this episode with Kyle, please consider rating and reviewing the podcast on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen. As always, it is very, very helpful so that more people find the show. And the show is also a part of the thought leadership of Brooks digital. We do a lot of website, user experience design and development, specifically for health nonprofits. We’re the only agency built for them. So, if you’d like this podcast, feel free to go to our website at Brooks.digital. And you can find more of our insights and learn about our work. But with all that said, Kyle, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Kyle Taylor 36:42

Thanks for having me.

36:49

Thanks for listening to help nonprofit digital marketing. If you liked this episode, leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. And don’t forget to check out the Brooks digital website at www.Brooks.digital where you can find other resources like this podcast. Learn how we help nonprofits like yours and get in touch with our team. See you in the next episode.