Case Studies

A small non-profit launched several years ago to provide opportunities to connect youth with opportunities to play ultimate frisbee in Colorado was outgrowing its web site. It needed a new site that could not only showcase calendar events, organizational news, and background resources but one that had a long wish list of additional features, including:

• Highly customizable event registration
• Payment processing
• Membership management
• Team mapping
• Volunteer recruitment
• E-newsletter integration
• …and more

What they needed was not just a web site but a full-featured constituent management system (CMS) to manage individuals and memberships, e-newsletters, event registrations, and help sort and serve information to different groups of potential users.

Surveys to web site stakeholders (inside and outside of the organization’s staff) to determine web site priorities.

• Interview board members and frequent site users, as well as others who had interacted with the organization, to help understand how the web site could be a better tool for the organization.
• Develop a list of features requests and asked the same group of participants to help rank and prioritize these features.
• Develop site wireframes to help the web site committee understand how these features would look in practice and provide layout options.
• Research possible approaches to the web/newsletter/CMS integration, including WordPress, NationBuilder, Configio, and several other tools at varying price points and levels of integration and customizability.

Several sets of options for site wireframe.

After selecting NationBuilder based on price point, features match, ability to customize, and capacity to grow with the organization over the next several years, I began building out the site theme and customizing the site features based on the prioritizes culled from user surveys.

At several points during this buildout the client was brought in to provide feedback, re-prioritize feature requests, and detail how features would be used in practice.

A large state-based conservation non-profit re-branded, and needed to update their web site to reflect their new brand. In addition, they had tons of information to display, but didn’t have a site architecture that allowed users to drill down without getting overwhelmed. In addition, the site was not very mobile responsive, especially for donation and event registration forms.

Our priorities were to:

• Make information available without overwhelming users
• Make site easier to update for organizational staff
• Use large-scale imagery to highlight the visual aspects of the organization’s work
• Organize information into buckets that matched the organization’s structure and also made sense to users

One of several punch lists used to keep several team members updated and make sure we were working together towards shared goals.

Working with an internal point person, we:

• Updated and refreshed all web site copy
• Revamped web theme and layout to match new organizational ID
• Integrated high-quality photography
• Integrated social media and opportunities for engagement
• Connected organizational projects to individual staff working on them
• Made sure donate and event registration forms were mobile-friendly and secure
• Structured information architecture to appeal to both internal and external users
• Structured sub-pages to allowed for deeper dives into material without overwhelming users on contact
• Kept large organization and staff with other priorities on-track and on-target to meet deadlines