Rhetorical Analysis of Goodwill

The audiences of the Goodwill website seem to be

1. Shoppers
2. Local Businesses
3. Donators
4. Potential government funders and/or nonprofit watchdogs
5. Students

For each of these audiences, the rhetoric of the website has different content areas and types of persuasion. Following is my critique of the rhetoric aimed toward these five audiences.

Shoppers
Goodwill shoppers are probably the most general audience for this website. The desired pathos in the presentation of the site seems to be that of friendliness. This is demonstrated mostly by all of the pictures of smiling faces and friendly workers. Overall, the delivery of pathos seems to work in the favor of Goodwill. What is less effective, however, is the delivery of store locations. As it is right now, the store location list does not seem to be organized in any particular way (at first I though alphabetically, but even alpha-order is not followed). The most effective way to organize the information would probably be in clusters of store within close proximity to one another (organize by distance).

Local Businesses
Overall, the section of the Goodwill website dedicated to local businesses, who might want to hire Goodwill employees or purchase goods from the store, seems very basic. More explanation of how Goodwill has impacted local businesses might be useful for people not familiar with Goodwill programs; and definitions of terms such as “State of Michigan Rehabilitation Vendor” would probably help to clarify Goodwill’s role in the community and for local businesses.

Donators
It seems that community members interested in donating goods and/or money to Goodwill might also be interested in donating time to Goodwill by way of volunteer hours. Because of this, I find it strange that “Volunteer” is found as a separate link off the Goodwill side-bar and at the very bottom of the main page. My suggestion would be to either include volunteer information with donation information or to make volunteers one of the main targeted audiences.

Potential Funders/Nonprofit Watchdogs
What might be confusing to a potential funder or “watchdog” is that Goodwill’s mission is in a completely different area than the programs and services information. To me, an organization’s mission and its programs go hand-in-hand. Pairing programs and services information with “Meet Goodwill” information would help to show how Goodwill is fulfilling its mission through programming that is positively affecting the community.

Students
By far, the most confusing part of the Goodwill website rhetoric, at least for me, was the information dedicated to Goodwill students. Because Goodwill’s mission is ”to assist people with disabilities or other barriers to realize their full employment potential and to be self-reliant, self-supporting and contributing members of our society,” it would seem that Goodwill students are the core population impacted by the organization. The website, however, does not necessarily reflect this idea.

The start of the problem begins on the mainpage: the command-type wording seems to suggest only four sub-sections off the main page. Because the wording is different from other content areas and also because there is not a graphic, it is unclear that “Programs & Services” is a content area unless it is scrolled-over.

Another inconsistency in the “Programs & Services” content area is that only one part of the information is bilingual. The “Employment Opportunities” page lists job opportunities in both English and Spanish, but that is the only part of the page, and seems to be the only part of the entire site, that is bilingual. Having information in two languages seems to be a good idea, but it must be consistent in order to be effective.