The Client
The Home for Little Wanderers (THLW) is a nationally renowned, private, nonprofit child and family service agency. It has been part of the Massachusetts landscape for over 200 years, making it the oldest agency of its kind in the nation and one of the largest in New England. Originally founded as a orphanage in 1799, The Home today plays a leadership role in delivering services to thousands of children and families each year through a system of residential, community-based and prevention programs, direct care services, and advocacy.
The Problem
The oldest agency of its kind in the United States, THLW needed a website that would reflect its long history in serving children and their families in need. THLW also needed a look-and-feel that would better represent its offline brand and personality, balancing the seriousness of its core mission (the healthy emotional, mental and emotional development of children at risk) with the playfulness and fun that signify its commitment to kids. With a small staff and limited resources for maintaining TheHome.org, THLW expressed a practical need to set up an administrator experience that would allow for easy publishing of new content on the website, simple administration of the site navigation, and fresh presentation of new content – without having a full-time webmaster. THLW's team partnered with Convio to build their full new website, from defining the information architecture to creating a successful online version of their established brand to implementing the new website on Convio PageBuilder from the ground up.
How We Solved It
Through a series of information architecture and creative strategy meetings, our Convio design team learned about all of the goals for the new user experience of TheHome.org, including the prioritization of many disparate audience groups with differing needs, from engaging supporters such as individual donors, corporations, and volunteers to educating visitors such as adoptive and foster parents, other agencies, and the media to retaining constituents such as alumni of THLW. Together, Convio and THLW developed a new content organization to balance all of these key needs and to offer strategic pathways into the site content for visitors with particular areas of focus or from particular populations. We outlined a new navigation plan to meet the needs of TheHome.org's users, as well as the organization's requirement of simple maintenance and flexibility. In addition, we assessed many different models for successfully translating THLW's offline identity into an effective online design that could be built to provide fresh content with low maintenance requirements that would allow The Home to spend more time focusing on kids and families.
The Outcome
The new and improved TheHome.org reflects both strategic organizational goals and critical audience needs. Our design puts THLW's mission and its commitment to children front-and-center, offering targeted photos of kids and families which correspond to each key content area and feature on the site. In addition, THLW's new user experience focuses audience members down three key interactive engagement pathways (donating, registering, and an engagement promotion that changes based on the time of year), offers general news and updates on the organization's work, and allows for interesting interactive features like sending eCards and joining social networking campaigns through Facebook.
Convio products used: eCards, Social Media, Web Content Management
