Eight Schema Strategies for Nonprofit Content Websites

Have you wondered how people get the nifty boxes at the top of Google which shows an organizational summary, an image and title of their article, or even a walkthrough of steps? Those boxes not only provide more traffic to your site but can play a big part in getting important information into the world. They are implemented through structured content in an agreed-upon format— or “schema”-- that allows search engines (and potentially other technologies, like chatbots or Alexa) to understand your web pages.

For a great overview of schema basics, see Firefly’s article Schema Basics for Your Nonprofit’s Website. Margaret Hagen also has a great overview that covers a bit more of the technical side. (Hers is specific to the legal aid sector, but the basics are the same for all). 

Schemas are a great example of why it can be very useful to have a digital or content strategist as a “translator” on your team. Schemas are fairly technical, possibly even more to plan for than to implement. It’s not hard for a coder to drop the schema snippet onto your homepage to identify your website as a site for a service organization, for instance. But if you have a lot of content, you almost certainly need to think about how the schema will work with your content management system. And if you have more than just a lot of the same type of content, you’ll need to figure out how the schema differs (if it does) between each type.

Fingers can start pointing on this type of thing. Content and marketing people may say “That’s technical stuff; I can’t tell you what to implement”.  Technical people say “Just tell me what to build— I can’t tell you what you need.”

Well, content and marketing people, this is for you. Schemas aren’t super complicated, just a little detailed. Here’s the types of things you should think about. It’s not comprehensive, but hopefully useful to get you started.

Homepage

• You should definitely add the WebSite schema code to identify key properties about your site. If you take a look at that link, you’ll get a sense of what the gist of a schema is in detail. It’s a long list of things (properties) that you describe for your own site.

• Add a schema about your organization. Check Schema.org (the central place for schema knowledge) to see if there’s a schema to say more about your type of organization. (View the full list of all schema types) For instance, there’s LegalService, GovernmentOrganization, FundingAgency. If all else fails, there’s always the NGO or Organization schema.

• If you have a reasonable search functionality embedded in your site, add the capability to do a site search via Google’s rich results.

Topic and Subtopic Pages

• Topic pages are generally about navigation more than content that can be structured, so schema doesn’t apply as much here as it does on homepages and articles

• There’s a few specific speciality areas—particularly, health info, with HealthTopicContent— that have a topic level schema

• If you operate in a space where your topics correspond to some higher level set of codes or taxonomy, consider using the Webpage type with the  ‘about’ structure, combined with the ‘DefinedTerm’ structure, to signal what terms are covered. For instance, in the legal aid space, there’s a set of codes used by the whole sector to define the legal area of a service, so many of the statewide LawHelp sites map their topics to those codes.

Articles

Here’s where most of your strategy comes in. How do you encourage search engines to show snippets of your site by identifying the structure of your content— when your articles are likely pretty far from structured?  Here’s some possibilities.

• Article. This is an actual schema name, which shows a highlight image, title, date

• Report.  A Subset of “Article”, which allows you to provide more info about the research credentials.

• HowTo. Requires you to have a set of ordered steps, and mark up each step. This will likely some substantial content management system integration

• QAPage. When you have a question and then answer. Likely a little harder to integrate with your site than some, but helps to feed the top answers and People Also Ask box

• FAQPage. Similar to the above, but when you have a number of questions on the same page. 

• ItemList. Could be applied to any list with bullets or numbers. This could be used to get SEO for a few key lists, or you could integrate it with your content management system. This is primarily a SEO tactic, rather than one to try to reach audiences with key answers to questions.

• If you’re a health organization, take a look at the full list of all schema types — there’s a ton of types just to structure medical and health information.

Other Content Types

Of course, not all content is written. There’s loads of other possibilities, including particularly useful ones like:

• Event: This will show up on searches for things to do. There’s a slew of subtypes of Event that can help search engines connect people to you, like ChildrensEvent, MusicEvent, TheaterEvent, and many more

• VideoObject: A video, which shows up in a playable mode in many search engines

• Course: For your online or offline learning opportunities.

Defining Your Schema Strategy

Certain schema types— like a variation on Organization or NGO— make sense for nearly every nonprofit. Some are going to require more commitment, both in terms of technical implementation and the governance required to ensure the content goes into your content management system correctly to take advantage of the schema. 

Things that you can add in on whole webpages— like Article, or Event— are likely to be a lot easier than something like How-To, which needs to be tightly integrated with the text within the page.

Don’t make a detailed strategy without taking a look at the full list of all schema types currently available. It may spark some additional thoughts, and give you a sense of other things that make sense for your own work. 

If your mission involves getting critical information in front of a wide swath of the public, sizable schema implementations might make sense. But for many smaller organizations, especially those with a niche audience, very little of what I’ve covered here may be worth implementing. Like anything else, the key is to make sure you know why you’re doing it. 

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