Building Purpose-Driven Websites: How Andrea Hattox Helps Nonprofits Shine Online

Tasha: [00:00:00] Good morning. Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your nonprofit origin story?

Andrea: Yeah, so my name is Andrea Hattox and I got into nonprofits via a side road or a back road, I guess you could say. I grew up in a family of service, so I always grew up volunteering, doing stuff with nonprofits, with mission organizations, but didn’t actually come into the business side of it until.
Probably about five years ago, a little bit longer if you count the idea that we had. But basically, my husband and I were living overseas doing the digital nomad thing, and we each had our own individual freelancing businesses. Got very tired of working with random companies, selling stuff to people that they really didn’t need and that didn’t, speak to our souls.
So we decided to take our skills and bring ’em together and work in an area that we felt was a little bit more meaningful. And that’s how we ended up coming into nonprofits. So we didn’t have a specific. In-house position with a nonprofit or a particular experience that made us say nonprofits.
But it was more a, accumulation of many years of just getting [00:01:00] tired of writing, commercial stuff, selling commercial stuff and looking for something that was more important.

Tasha: And tell me just like quick overview the business itself and what you and Austin are doing for nonprofits.

Andrea: Yeah, so we own Pixel Lighthouse, and it is a nonprofit website agency. So we work exclusively with nonprofits. Sometimes with nonprofit consultants or mission adjacent businesses, but it is always united by that purpose driven spirit. So the vast majority of our clients are nonprofits, and we help with every aspect of the website process.
That includes the copywriting, the design, and of course the actual coding and building. We tailor what we do based on each client’s needs. So the packages look a little bit different, but it is always finding the right story, telling it in the right way, getting visitors to take the right actions on your website so that it’s not just a pretty picture, just something sitting there, but it’s actually working hard for the mission and in support of what the staff is already doing.

Tasha: Love it. And I’m gonna take this moment to just shout out the fact that [00:02:00] if people come on the nonprofit hive website and see our cool partners. Layout design, searchability. This is Andrea and Austin, where I literally put something on a piece of paper while drinking a glass of wine one night with my husband and talking about it, and then somehow showed it to yourself.
And Austin and you guys made it look like, I wasn’t even sure what it was, but I actually kept the paper because that’s been part of our nonprofit hive evolution. Both of you have always been super generous. With, our journey and going, I have no idea how to fix this.
I was left with a custom code website that I didn’t know how to crunch or whatever. So deeply appreciative and huge kudos to both of you for making beauty out of nonsense scribblings, from me.

Andrea: It’s so funny you bring that up because I actually remember Austin being like, oh, Tasha wanted help with this one thing.
And I was like, oh, great. Yeah, happy to do it. Let’s talk about it. And he shoved me a picture, I think, of the piece of paper, and he was like, well, this is what we’re going off of. I was like. Great. Sounds [00:03:00] good.

Tasha: I just laughed because I was like, what more do you need from me? I think this is, we can probably start working off this.
I am impressed because I didn’t expect it to move that fast and just thought it was awesome what you guys had pulled together. So you’ve lived all over the world, big travelers, and have worked with a variety of nonprofits. What’s your favorite part about working in this sector?

Andrea: Yeah, that’s a good question.
Honestly, I feel like I love learning. Just I read voraciously, I love learning new things, getting new experiences, as evidenced by our kind of lifestyle over the last 10 years or so. And I feel like what I love most is that every nonprofit is so different. So they have, obviously similar challenges, especially on their websites and things that we bring into the business lens.
But from a personal viewpoint, I really like just seeing how people are responding to challenges that I didn’t necessarily even know existed. So we’ll work with a very specific nonprofit, for example, that [00:04:00] randomly we just launched a website, but they, connect. Septic pumping professionals with families that are undergoing chemotherapy.
So someone in the household is undergoing chemotherapy. Because if you have a particular type of septic system, the chemotherapy drugs can really impact its longevity and its durability. And this was a thing that I had literally never thought of. Couldn’t have conceptualized, oh, this is a problem that needs solving.
But in talking to a client, we learned not only is it a problem, but people are actually doing something about it, which I feel is inspiring kind of gives you an idea of, what is possible in the world and if you see a problem, you can do something about it in some way. Whether that means actually starting a nonprofit like this particular client did, or it’s a smaller action, that you take in support of some kind of solution.
But I have learned about so many different areas of issues always connected to what people are doing about it. So I think it’s a very inspiring. It’s an inspiring lens to think about the world to see there are problems, but people are doing things about it. And really [00:05:00] creatively, it’s like the solutions are also things.
Wow. I would never have thought you could do that, but it works.

Tasha: Clearly it’s working. Huge amount of innovation. Right. And I don’t think most nonprofits look at themselves as innovators. They just go, there’s a problem. We gotta solve it somehow. Or we’re going to take on. What is inarguably? Just even thinking about the logistics of organizing what you’re describing and how many areas do you offer it, that seems like something that would be required, potentially across the country in a national movement, and someone looks at that and goes, yeah, I think we could start solving that.
And that’s wild, right? We have governments that don’t even try to touch these problems. And nonprofits go, oh yeah, I can do that.

Andrea: Yeah, and it is often that yes mentality, which always has a dark side because it can lead to burnout and overwork and overextension and lots of problems.
But I think the spirit of it is really important where you see an issue, or you’re working with a group of people solving one problem, but then you realize through [00:06:00] the course of that work that there’s this other problem that nobody is doing anything about. So it’s like yeah, we can do something about that.
We’ll figure it out. We’ll see how we can put our resources together, we can use our expertise, we can use the staff that we have and we can actually do something about it. And then over time, improve it and get better and better. And yeah, it is very inspiring to see how people are responding to problems in a way that makes the world a little bit better, which I think we need a little bit more of all the time these days.
Just a view of, okay, people are doing things and there is good happening and we can contribute to that in some way.

Tasha: Absolutely. I actually feel more hopeful having been working in this sector, even though it’s hard right now, and it’s been hard to watch people walk out of, COVID with, some hope for the sector and then being like, oh my goodness, can we handle another beat down right now?
I’m not sure, but it is a hopeful group, right? A group that does get up, try again. Have that if not me, then who mentality is a beautiful part of this sector. I always like to [00:07:00] ask, and this can be very specific to the work that you do through Pixel Lighthouse as well, but what do you see as some of the biggest challenges this sector’s facing  right now?

Andrea: For us, we’ve definitely seen just the uncertainty around funding and budgets and how that is. Impacting the decisions that nonprofits are making about where they allocate their funds. So for some of our clients, that means maybe pausing, hopefully coming back to us later. For some, it means changing how they are allocating those funds given the constraints that they’re facing.
For some of our clients, it does mean investing more in their communications because they know. Our website is very old. The brand is very outdated. It’s not communicating really who we are or why we matter. So now is the time to invest in that. While there’s so much uncertainty around the programming and the other pieces.
So we’ve seen both sides of the spectrum in terms of this motivating nonprofits to take some action in the general branding communication space. [00:08:00] And then for others, forcing them to pull back a little bit because they don’t think that they have the funds that we’re expecting to have at this point.
And it seems like it comes down a lot to just where they’re getting their money from, obviously. So some are impacted more than others directly with all of the issues with the administration right now. But even the ones that are having to pull back, on maybe the projects they were planning to do, whether that’s with us or some other program, there is still, again, that, mindset of, okay, what can we do?
So I feel like the beginning of the year was really uncertain and really slow, and pretty much all of the nonprofits we talked to and all the consultants we talked to were feeling the same kind of weird. Just weirdness going on. Nobody was really sure for us and the people that we’ve spoken with and our clients right now, it seems like we are coming past that in a way.
So I think there seems to be more movement. People are adapting and trying to move forward given all the uncertainty that everybody is still facing. So it seems like we took a pause, maybe collectively got [00:09:00] some bearings and are just, doing again what we can, saying yes to things to move forward.
Continue making our impact happen however that looks at this particular moment in time.

Tasha: I think what’s really interesting and in a constant challenge I find myself butting up against, is a lot of people seem to be, or for-profit people external to the sector may look at nonprofits engaging with consultants, and they think, well, you could probably do this yourself without remembering that the deep amount of expertise you need.
To design and build a website, or do you even have a website that allows you, if you had somebody else build it initially to make changes is wild, right? And you have time to learn said skills. I love to use the example of people being like, oh, I’m just gonna casually set up Google Analytics for, or Google Ads, and you’re like, oh no, you’re not.
That’s just another thing, right? As someone who even did some training in all of those [00:10:00] things, I still. It’s like pulling teeth, right? And so I think there’s so many better things manpower wise for relationship building that is going to have to be your internal members of your nonprofit doing that work.
Really, you need the expertise and it ends up being faster. Yes, it looks like upfront costs are a lot, but oftentimes it’s going, no. This is the difference between you finishing a project in the next three months and being a year from now and still maybe not being in a spot that makes you happy.
It’s hard. Yes, funds are small, like small or smaller at this point ongoing challenges if you don’t engage with people who really know expert level how to do these pieces of work.

Andrea: Yeah, I think that’s huge because like you said, it seems like a big cost upfront, whether it’s a website project or engaging with another consultant for fundraising or some other type of expertise.
But in the long run, you are saved a lot of headache, a lot more money, a lot of time because the people on your team, you hired them to do a particular thing, and in our case, it’s almost never the [00:11:00] website. So usually it’s like the director of development has to manage the website because that’s the only person that’s there and can do it.
That’s not that person’s job and that person’s expertise is not in websites. Like they’re great at building relationships, at doing campaigns and moving fundraising forward. So every hour they spend wrangling with their website or wrangling with some software is an hour that they’ve not spent, reaching out to a donor or making a call to someone who they’ve been needing to call for months.
And so it really just isn’t a good use of their time. It often doesn’t make that person feel very important or valued because you know they’re doing a task that is outside of what they were expecting to do outside of their expertise. They know that they could be spending their time in a better way. So everybody just ends up feeling frustrated and kind of halted.
That’s never good for team morale anyways. But like you said, doing it yourself often gives you something that works. Maybe it doesn’t work at all at the beginning, which is often the outcome, but maybe it does work for, a month or two months until the person [00:12:00] realizes oh, we didn’t consider this scenario.
We didn’t consider that we’ll need to add a new page. We didn’t consider that, our strategic direction is changing next year and we’re gonna have to regroup everything. And we didn’t really consider what that would look like or how we could easily do that moving forward. And so it ends up being just.
Constant work immediately because it wasn’t necessarily thought through in a way, which makes sense because they’re not website specialists, so they don’t necessarily think of these, 10 edge cases that we would build into every project because it’s just not something they’ve had familiarity with before.
So in the long run it hurts much more. Yeah, it helps certainly.

Tasha: Absolutely. Peer support has been critical for me along this journey and into building the nonprofit hive. I’ve shouted out, Austin multiple times for being part of the inspiration to start it because I was like, oh my goodness, I’m just talking to somebody else who knows what this is like working in this sector and it was just such a random lunch club chat that, I didn’t expect to meet [00:13:00] anybody that I was going to end up being friends with years later.
So I think this is the direct example of what can happen when you meet somebody cool that can help support you, gets where you’re coming from. And so for yourself, you have a built in peer support to some extent with your partner and working together. I don’t know about you, that’s always a little bit interesting for me with my husband helping me with difficult work.
How does peer support factor into your growth in the sector and continuing to make the connections you need for your business?

Andrea: Yeah, that’s a great question. I feel like a very timely one because you know, Tasha, up until this year, Austin has been really the face of our business and he’s been the networking guy.
He’s been the frontline marketing guy. He has done the outreach, the building connections, all that stuff, which I deeply appreciate and we needed somebody to do it, and he did it. The whole time he was like, Andrea, you should do this too. You would love it. I was like, no, I don’t know. I feel shy or I don’t wanna put myself out there.
I’m too busy or I have lots of things to do. I don’t know. Didn’t I stood in my own way, I didn’t wanna do it. And finally this year I [00:14:00] thought, okay, I guess after, five years maybe I’ll listen to what Austin has been advisory and actually take his advice. And so I thought, okay, this year I’m setting my intention officially, like my New Year’s.
Goal or intention was going to be to reach out, try to find some community and just see how it goes. And of course, as soon as I did it, I loved it and I was like, why didn’t I do this three years ago? Because from a professional standpoint, it’s really nice to get a pulse on what’s happening in the sector and see if other people are experiencing what we’re experiencing.
And if so, we can commiserate. If not, we can maybe learn from, what they’re doing differently, get some tactics or some advice, or even just some, encouragement. And then from a personal perspective, it is just nice to have friends who understand because absolutely. Really outside of, the people we’ve met through the hive and through other means in the nonprofit community.
Most of our real life friends work traditional jobs, and so they haven’t really had that kind of remote experience. They don’t work in the nonprofit [00:15:00] sector, which is all perfectly fine, but they’re, puts up some barriers to understanding what we really do and what life is like for us and what work looks like.
So being able to speak with people who come, from a similar kind of working setup and also work in the sector is really very helpful for me on both personal and professional levels, just to have that sense of community and feel like other people get it and I can talk to somebody about what’s going on and get advice or commiserate or just feel like less alone, I think in the work that we’re doing.
Which, especially this year and in these moments of like uncertainty and pausing and not really being sure what’s coming in the future has been really important. So I think. The universe was kind in setting up this year as the year that Andrea needs to go out and meet people because it’s really the moment that I needed it.
So I’m thankful for Austin, bugging me about it for three years. It given me the push.

Tasha: Well, I think we’re all thankful that you, jumped in as well for, and it [00:16:00] is so interesting once you do start talking to more and more people when you are in a small shop solopreneur or very small.
Organization. It’s so easy to just end up in this echo chamber of only the two of your thoughts we’re even doing this. You know, myself, I’ve got Nicole, I’ve got Nina. It is very hyper-focused in on the nonprofit hive and it’s sometimes good to just get out there and go, oh wait, other people are doing all of these cool things and instead seeing some of.
Even trying to understand how we fit. Right. And sometimes that’s the piece too, is that when you get talking with others, you go, oh, we fit here. And not in a comparison necessarily style way. Although even that’s beneficial sometimes it’s more going. It’s really hard to tell how well you’re doing sometimes or how things are going when you have no point of reference, around you.
So it’s really easy sometimes to go, oh my goodness, we’re not doing enough, and then I’ll get talking to a whole bunch of other people. I’m going, actually, we’re doing [00:17:00] okay here. I think it’s not actually, and that’s not in a way to go, oh, I. Think they’re not doing what they should be doing, but more in a, oh wait, maybe we can help support each other.
Maybe we can find ways to collaborate that are actually meaningful to both of us. But if I don’t have the conversation, I have no ability to even begin moving that forward.

Andrea:  Yeah. I think you, you hit on a good point there where, we do nonprofit websites exclusively, so we work a lot with nonprofits in that one particular capacity.
But because neither Austin nor I came from an in-house position, we didn’t come with all of the built-in knowledge around what else nonprofits are doing and all the various pieces. So I think talking to people has really helped teach me what nonprofits need, what they’re worried about, what else they’re balancing, a million other things besides the website, but just like a much broader and deeper picture of, the landscape of what any particular client is going through, which has helped us a lot in terms of understanding.
What could the website do better? What could the future version of the website do that would support their team more and how they might be [00:18:00] using it in ways that they don’t necessarily articulate to us. But because I’ve spoken to the operations person and the IT person and the fundraising person, from all these different experiences, we can get that picture much more fully and come to the client with a better solution for the things that they’re facing, even if they don’t necessarily tell it to us themselves.
But I think has been really helpful.

Tasha: That’s awesome. I always like to finish up these conversations with asking what you have gotten out of being a member of our community. And I just looked quickly and so this I think is it this week you have done 19 conversations as the last one. So you know, for a person who was like, I’m just gonna dive in this year.
You’ve done a great job of like diving right in. Deeply appreciative of that. What have you gotten out of being a member of this community?

Andrea: I’m actually glad you pointed out the 19 because I was wondering, before this call, I was like, how many have I actually done now? I think it’s been a lot, and 19 is much more than I thought.
I was thinking it was like [00:19:00] 10 maybe. I think really the ability to just talk to somebody who has an adjacent experience. So it’s always someone doing something with a nonprofit that’s not usually what we’re directly doing. So I can get some insights from them about how their business is going.
If it’s a business person or if it’s a nonprofit professional, I can see, what they’re experiencing, what life is like for them in the nonprofit right now. And then from that, just build a genuine personal connection. I feel like almost every person I’ve talked to so far has been somebody that I was like, I would never have met you otherwise.
There’s no reason our paths would’ve crossed, even on LinkedIn, I probably wouldn’t have known to find you. But through the hive we just met randomly and, hit it off, had great rapport, had really interesting conversation. I always walk away with at least one or two, nuggets of wisdom I could never have found elsewhere.
I didn’t know nonprofits even needed that, or I didn’t realize that could be a problem that you were facing. So it just broadens my world view and my [00:20:00] perspective on what we’re doing and how we fit into the broader landscape. And I’ve made some good friends.
So there are a few who I have continued to keep in touch with and feel like have moved from the professional network acquaintance into the like actual friend zone, which is really nice.

Tasha: I was just talking to Dan Drucker who was like, oh my goodness. Andrea and Austin are amazing. And I think I had a conversation with Maddie Nance a couple weeks ago.
She’s like, oh my goodness, they’re the best. And I’m like, yeah, we have to start like a collective of people who work with their partners. Clearly, because that’s own special, space to be working in, but I totally agree. I usually end up with about five tabs open on my computer as people say things about the wide range of different.
Projects going on in the nonprofit world that I just had no idea about because I’m here in Canada living, in a smaller town with my family and kids, and so it does tend to open it back up for me and remind me that there is a whole bunch of other things going on out there that you [00:21:00] probably won’t even see on LinkedIn.

Andrea: And practical insights like, Hey, we’re using this software. It’s been really helpful. Have you heard of it? Or, we found this random service we’ve never used before, but we’re really loving it. Have you tried it? I’m like, oh no. I’m going to go look that up immediately.

Tasha: Exactly. Exactly. Well, this has been lovely.
Quick ways that people can get in touch with you and a little bit quick reminder on what Pixel Lighthouse offers.

Andrea: Yeah, so Pixel Lighthouse does website projects for nonprofits. That includes the full redesign, the copywriting, the building, and the code. You can find us @pixellighthouse.com, or you can find me, Andrea Hattox on LinkedIn, or my husband Austin Hattox.
Also on LinkedIn. We’re both fairly active there, so you can comment on our posts or connect with us. We’d love to make new connections, always up for a virtual coffee chat. And any questions about nonprofit websites as well. We’re very open. Love to talk to people.

Tasha: Yeah. That’s awesome. All right. Thanks so much for doing this with me, Andrea.
Just been a joy and it’s been lovely to have, [00:22:00] pixel lighthouse’s support just as we were growing and getting out there. I always look at my website and. I’m shocked that we have this nice website, so thank you. Thank you. Deeply appreciative.

Andrea: Yeah, thank you. Like I said, I appreciate having the hive as a way to easily connect with people and kind of keep me accountable for my goal of, building more connections.
So it’s an easy way to say, yes, I’ll pick a time and do it and meet somebody. Interesting. I’m always happy I did it.

Tasha: Awesome.