A few years ago, The Wallace Foundation, an independent national nonprofit, faced a challenge.
Forward-thinking insights are a critical pillar of its mission to create “a more vibrant and just future by fostering advances in the arts, education leadership and youth development.” And yet, the nonprofit’s external-facing communications and branding materials, namely its website, did not reflect the plethora of deep industry expertise and market leadership it had in the primary sectors (namely arts, education and youth development) that it served.
The challenge was two-fold: The site was not optimized to take full advantage of podcasts, video series and complex infographics, which were increasingly used to convey insights and stories about their work.
Additionally, the technological platform of the website was obsolete and difficult to maintain, resulting in poor search functionality and navigation issues. Simply put, users could not find the content they needed.
This focus on insights – and making it easy for consumers to find the information they need – is critical because knowledge is a central component of the Foundation’s three-pronged success pillar. That is, it seeks to deeply understand the sectors that it serves, so that it can generate the best strategy to support those seeking grants, and finally, share applicable best practices with the wider public to further advance the grant and fundraising cycle nationwide. Simply put, knowledge is power.
Audience research provided valuable insights into the motivation and mindsets of users visiting the website, revealing what they hoped to find and how they intended to use that information. We utilized these insights to design the user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) for the new site. The new “Insights” page and individual report pages are great examples of pages designed with the user in mind.
Our team completely overhauled the website, including its software platform (moving to Drupal), navigation, and content presentation with a full UX and UI redesign.
The website now follows a new content strategy grounded in user-centered design principles. We made significant improvements in displaying, organizing, and presenting their extensive content.
We also collaborated closely with them to simplify their writing, making it easier for users to share knowledge and influence their sector. This was a monumental undertaking for the client, involving hundreds of hours of work. We provided guidance throughout this process with weekly content strategy calls to review completed work, ongoing tasks, and address any questions.
We suggested and configured a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system to facilitate easier maintenance of all their content assets, saving their employees hours of work in maintaining the site.
With insights fueling impact as their guiding star, The Wallace Foundation’s team unveiled its new website earlier this year. It’s now live at https://wallacefoundation.org/ and the team is continually monitoring and responding to user navigation, downloads and feedback, so that they can even further improve the user experience.
In doing so, the team took learnings from the site’s predecessor and made the end product even better. New and well-received features thus far include:
A digital asset transformation of previously lengthy PDF reports. The predecessors were difficult to read, share and navigate online. And so, we transformed these reports into interactive digital assets, making key information easily shareable, thereby improving readability and allowing users to save their progress and return where they left off.
