Change for the Better

Every website project has its own specific demands, so our development process always opens with a collaborative discovery phase. First the client educates us about their culture and their mission, and then the conversation moves to the website itself: how it’s used, what’s working and not working, and how it needs to evolve.

Through our ongoing conversations with ACORN, we were able to agree on a clear set of priorities for the new website, and JMA designed a methodical process for making the transition from the old site to the new one. Here are the challenges and objectives we identified together.

1. First, the site had an outdated look and feel, and badly needed a visual refresh. ACORN wanted to preserve their existing logo and colour, which is what we recommended as well. So our task was to present those elements more effectively in our redesign.
2. Second, we reevaluated the platform used for ACORN’s site. ACORN had rightly emphasized the importance of regularly updating content to represent the successes of local actions. But there were downsides to this best practice: content was added but rarely removed, so the site had accumulated a clutter of posts that were no longer relevant. After assessing ACORN’s content and workflows, we recommended a transition from Drupal to WordPress as a way of simplifying the user interface for ACORN’s staff and reducing the administrative load of maintaining the site. We agreed that ACORN would cull and curate the existing content, and JMA would facilitate the data migration. This wasn’t a small task! In addition to the front-end content, which included documentation of members’ activism and all the related petitions and support resources, ACORN had data for almost 250,000 contacts and 200,000 members.
3. Third, we agreed with ACORN that the new site should be optimized towards ACORN’s mission – empowering members, promoting action at the local level, and driving change. This goal was the core of our work on the project, and there were many aspects to it. We created a new information architecture to make it easier for users to navigate to the information and actions that were specific to their local objectives. We created new categories to represent the kinds of change ACORN and its members had determined were most important. Our redesign also prioritized calls to action, ensuring they were more prominent and easier to access. And, since the generation and management of petitions is vital to the organization, we customized CiviCRM functionality specifically for these tasks so that petition data could be seamlessly integrated with other workflows.

JMA and ACORN worked in tandem to achieve these goals and bring the project to completion. While we were using the results of our discovery process to design and build the new site, ACORN focussed on content-related tasks, identifying outdated information and determining what needed to be moved over or added. We staged the draft website so that content could be migrated, allowing ACORN to test and confirm the viability of the new information architecture and functionality.