Squarespace for small non-profit organizations
May 07, 2021
Squarespace for small non-profit organizations
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Squarespace
Our non-profit uses Squarespace as our website builder for our organization's website. We use Squarespace as a solution for our web presence and for e-commerce capabilities that has allowed us to sell merch and physical CDs. We've also used Squarespace's e-commerce to "sell" free PDF downloads with resources for teachers, which has also allowed us to collect their email addresses for further engagement. We previously used Squarespace's Donation capabilities as well, which was fantastic when we were just getting started. (We now have a Bloomerang form embedded into our Squarespace site.)
- Design - Squarespace is like an Apple product, it just looks really nice and does what you want it to do out of the box. If you're like most young non-profits, you probably just want to put up a basic website that looks visually appealing, presents information about your work, and collects donations. Squarespace is fantastic for that purpose.
- Accessible editing - If you have folks on staff who are not tech people, they will still likely be able to make quick updates to text or replace a photo with Squarespace. The editor is very newbie-friendly, and you can easily add restricted contributor users who can make certain changes, but can't bork the whole thing. Compared to a WordPress dashboard, Squarespace is super simple.
- Landing pages - Squarespace has a feature called "Cover Pages". These are really handy for when you'd like to make a quick landing page for a specific project or take your site offline temporarily. If you set up your site and only select a cover page as your site structure, the price for monthly service also drops dramatically.
- Domain included - When you create a Squarespace site, you can register a domain name for free for the first year. Many organizations have trouble keeping track of a separate web host and domain registrar and will lose their domain name unintentionally over an unpaid bill. Having the domain and the site hosting/builder all in one package comes in handy to avoid this situation.
- Pricing - I haven't done a lot of shopping around, but the price points for getting to e-commerce functionality seem fairly steep. It's worth doing the math on your expected sales to see if you should choose the commerce plan with transaction fees (less expensive monthly) or without. It's also challenging to compare with other solutions, because Squarespace is all inclusive while another product like WooCommerce will cost money as you go along in the build and can be hard to predict.
- Store Products are rigid - Squarespace uses Product objects for e-commerce, and they are created by the page. In other words, if you start building a store page and add 10 products, those products will not be accessible on other store pages across your site. If you're working with a large inventory, this can be a nightmare.
- E-commerce add ons - We were looking to create a popup that encouraged customers to donate to our organization, and this isn't natively available inside Squarespace. It was frustrating that we had to do a lot of searching for a third party company and pay $50 to get this done. It would be nice if Squarespace could offer a marketplace of approved vendors if they aren't interested in building out these types of standard e-commerce behaviors. I had to trust the $50 code would do what we wanted it to do without any backing from Squarespace. Luckily, it worked beautifully!
- We collected almost $10,000 worth of donations through our Squarespace site this year.
- We sold $4,000 worth of products via e-commerce.
- Our visibility online is high - folks who are looking for us specifically or an organization like ours can find us quickly on Google and other search engines. Driving social media traffic to our Squarespace site also results in high engagement and donations.
Squarespace has the simplest and most elegant WYSIWYG editor among these competitors. It's simple to understand the components and to move the elements around in a way that will look visually appealing - it's hard to make a Squarespace website look truly bad. WordPress is endlessly customizable, which is both its strength and weakness. It takes a lot longer to put up a simple WordPress website and involves a lot more frustration than it does to launch a simple Squarespace site. If you have content and are familiar with the editor, you can launch a basic Squarespace site that looks nice start to finish in about two hours.
Do you think Squarespace delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Squarespace's feature set?
Yes
Did Squarespace live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Squarespace go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Squarespace again?
Yes