Your Website Isn't Broken. It's Just Nobody's Job.
The case for giving your most public-facing asset the attention it deserves.
You have a tab with your website open, flagged for a review you've been meaning to do since the last board meeting. The bio for the board member who left in February is still up. The event registration link from March is still active — sort of — but it leads to a form for an event that's already happened. You've noted it. You'll fix it. Just not today.
Today there's a grant deadline, a donor call, a staff issue that needs to be handled carefully, and approximately forty-seven other things that also can't wait.
You’re doing mission-critical work with teams that were already lean before funding got complicated. The website is important — you know it's important — but it never quite reaches the top of the stack before something more urgent lands on it.
And so it sits. Functional enough. Not quite right.
Launching Your Website is Only Step #1
Websites are never done, yet website upkeep doesn't belong to any particular team member in a nonprofit. It's not program work. It's not fundraising. It's not finance. It lives in the gray space between communications, fundraising, and operations — three functions that, in most nonprofits, are either collapsed into one overloaded person or distributed across a team that's already stretched.
So, when the scholarship application link breaks, or the donation page stops talking to the CRM, or a new board member needs to be added and a departed one removed, the question of whose job is this gets a deer-in-headlights reaction and whoever has access to make website updates adds it to their lengthy to-do list.
And depending on the issue, they may or may not have the skills to fix it.
Partnering with an agency that provides website maintenance ensures you have those skills on your team at the level you need them. You can find a group that specializes in your CMS platform and offers a maintenance plan that fits your needs.
This partnership ensures you aren’t caught with a registration system that no longer works because the plugin you were using was retired, or you won’t receive panicked calls that your website is offline because someone forgot to renew the domain (and now you’ve realized no one knows where it’s hosted).
While this partnership adds a lot of value, it also adds a challenge. This kind of agency partnership sits outside your team, which means two things: first, there are some tasks that will be more efficient to handle internally. And second, there needs to be ongoing communication between what's happening inside the organization and what the website reflects.
The Role That Doesn't Exist Yet (But Should)
Imagine a team member who starts each week knowing which links need to be checked, which content is out of date, and which technical issue has been sitting in the maintenance queue for too long. Someone who knows when to update a page themselves and when to loop in the technical team and who already has the relationship to make that handoff smooth.
That's not a full-time job. For most nonprofits, it doesn't need to be. But what it needs to be is someone's job — a dedicated, consistent, accountable role that treats the website as the asset it actually is.
When that accountability exists, the dynamic with your technical provider changes entirely. Julie Spain of inConcert Web, which builds and maintains websites for nonprofits, has seen both sides of this. "Organizations with this kind of point person typically provide much more reliable and consistent communication," she says. "Without one, projects are more likely to stall, experience delays, or remain incomplete due to competing priorities and limited internal bandwidth."
What This Looks Like in Practice
A national scholarship organization, providing scholarships to injured workers, operates through 50 volunteer-led state affiliates.
Stephanie Dahl is a Nonprofit Virtual Assistant (NPVA®) who supports the organizations across six states: Ohio, Washington, Nebraska, Oregon, Oklahoma, and Nevada. Among the many things she manages for each organization, the website is a consistent responsibility. "A nonprofit's website is its first impression," she says, "and I ensure it remains vibrant and functional."
In practice, that means scholarship application, donation, and event registration links stay current, so the site actually works when donors and community members need it.
It also means having an ongoing working relationship with inConcert Web, the technical partner that maintains the organization’s state sites. When something needs attention, Stephanie catches it and routes it to her website partner. When a project requires coordination — like the tracking pixel implementation she managed for the Nebraska affiliate as part of a $20,000 grant — she's the person who bridges the organization's goal and the technical execution.
From inConcert's perspective, the NPVA relationship changes the nature of the partnership from the start. Spain describes how NPVAs shape the relationship before a project even begins: the early introduction, the aligned goals, the shared understanding of what the organization is trying to accomplish. "When all parties partner together from the start," she notes, "the organization benefits from stronger strategy, smoother implementation, and better long-term outcomes."
NPVAs act as the translator. They understand both the operational goals of the organization and the technical structure of the platform allowing them to clearly communicate issues, needs, and requirements to the technical partner and back to the organization.
Fractional Support Gets the Job Done
The website isn't going to manage itself. But it also doesn't need a full-time hire, a major initiative, or a budget line that isn't there. It needs an accountable internal person, a reliable technical partner, and a clear enough relationship between the two that things actually get done.
That's a solvable problem. And it's one that nonprofits of all sizes are solving right now not by finding more hours in the day, but by taking a fractional approach that ensures the right work belongs to the right person for only the time it requires.