As you’ll note in our News section , e-consultancy.com & iConcertina Creative have just issued a Charity Website Benchmark report revealing that many of the top 110 charities’ sites suffer from a lack of transparency, communicate poorly, and score quite low in accessibility.

In a recent podcast conversation over at Fundraising Technology, my colleague Mark Meade and charity consultant Lou Cook were discussing why transparency seems to be such a problem. One of their points was that organisations may not be deliberately obscuring their practices. They also noted that some of the information that would have counted toward transparency may well have existed in the site but was likely buried so deep in copy or presented in such an unclear manner that it could not be found. I agree wholeheartedly with this, and would highlight that true transparency is about making the information available and easy to get to.

In fact, one of the reasons I believe there was such a low online transparency score (especially for the bigger charities) is directly related to the usual difficulties with creating online communications and navigation. Whether you’re a large commercial operation or a non-profit, there is always a risk that in trying to represent all the various internal stakeholders’ interests, the website’s architecture can begin to fall apart. Bits get lost, then rediscovered and tucked into odd spots. Nobody knows quite what to do with that one odd department. And that other department demands its own presence. Before anyone knows it, the site’s architecture represents an internal structure, reflecting internal politics and concerns rather than offering a transparent view of the organisation or its key content. Avoiding this mistake is not impossible but it does mean a conscious effort needs to be placed on balancing the internal stakeholders’ requirements with your external audience’s perceptions and needs.

Whilst I am confident from experience that agencies like ours provide guidance to clients on these issues, I do wonder how much importance is truly placed on transparency in the initial brief. I suspect that more often than not, more attention is spent on the aspects of the look & feel than on the clarity of the content that lies within.