The Client
Jewish National Fund (JNF) began in 1901 collecting coins in blue boxes to purchase land and return the Jewish people to their homeland. In over 107 years, JNF has evolved into a global environmental leader and become the central address for partnering with the land and people of Israel. JNF has planted 240 million trees; built over 1,000 parks and recreational areas; constructed security roads; educated students around the world about Israel; created new communities so that Jewish people from around the world would have a place to call home; discovered new means of growing plants under arid conditions, bringing green to the desert; and built over 200 reservoirs and water recycling centers, increasing Israel’s water supply by 10%. Today, JNF is supporting Israel’s newest generation of pioneers by bringing life to the Negev Desert, Israel’s last frontier.
The Problem
Four years after the launch of its previous site, the JNF team realized that the organization had outgrown its website. In addition to an outdated design, JNF.org had become an extremely large, content-heavy site without a scalable information architecture to support this valuable content. Like their website, JNF as an organization had expanded in the breadth of its mission. Beyond planting trees in Israel and raising money through Blue Boxes, JNF had become a premiere environmental research and action organization. JNF realized that it needed a website that demonstrated the scope of its vision – serving as the “central U.S. address for all things Israel” – and that would be flexible enough to adapt to its evolving mission in the years to come.
How We Solved It
Several years after partnering with Convio as the software platform for its full website, JNF came to Convio in early 2008 to begin the process of re-architecting, re-designing, and re-building a new user experience for JNF.org. Along with the decision to upgrade its several-thousand-page site from PageBuilder to Convio’s CMS (Content Management System), JNF asked us to ensure that the new site would both effectively target its core audience groups, and attract a new, younger cohort of American Jewish people, helping the organization rebrand itself online with this demographic. Our process started with intensive stakeholder interviews, followed by a lengthy user research phase. Convio performed an audience survey of JNF constituents and a site path analysis of JNF.org web traffic. Personas were created to help the team better understand and identify with their audiences and a card sort test was performed to help influence the new information architecture of the site. Through an extensive, rigorous user research plan, we analyzed each audience group, integrating findings to produce a clear picture of the behaviors, perceptions, attitudes, and needs of all targeted profiles. Then, using our new constituent personas as a decision-making framework, we developed a new information architecture, visual design, and interaction plan to meet both JNF’s organizational goals and its online community’s needs.
The Outcome
Leveraging the best of what the Convio software suite has to offer, the new JNF.org, powered by Convio CMS and eCRM (constituent relationship management) tools, launched in early 2009, along with focused marketing tailored to each target audience group’s needs. Our creative strategy offers a new online brand for JNF and all of the audiences they appeal to today, which we confirmed directly with the organization’s constituents during usability testing of the new design. And the new JNF.org offers effective, personalized online interactions between constituents and the organization, allowing visitors to engage with JNF to do everything, including manage their purchases of trees to be planted in Israel, communicate directly with the JNF branch in their area, and receive dynamic content and messaging based on their areas of interest.
Convio products used: Web Content Management
