Website redesign helps a local non-profit organization
Summary
Cunningham Children’s Home is a child welfare and educational services agency that provides caring support and therapeutic intervention to children, youth, adults and families through residential treatment, special education and community-based services. Cunningham came to Pixo looking for a website redesign that would be modern and engaging. They also wanted a new CMS that would make content maintenance easier. The client stakeholders were very knowledgeable about child welfare and non-profit management, but they didn’t yet have a lot of direct insights from their audiences. They wanted to serve their current and potential clients better but weren’t sure how to accomplish that.
The challenge: Helping a vulnerable audience find what they need
Cunningham Children’s Home’s most important target audience, potential clients, often come to the website in a state of high stress, and they need a clear path to help. The biggest challenge of this project was helping Cunningham create new habits that eliminate excessive content and highlight the crucial content that helps that core audience access the services they need.
The solution: Hands-on workshops to deliver useful and flexible content
Audience workshop
Throughout this project, we invited the client to do hands-on work with us. At Pixo, we use hands-on work sessions and workshops whenever a group of stakeholders needs to come to a consensus on a big change. We knew that Cunningham needed to narrow their target audiences down from twelve and that a workshop was a good way to get them to that conclusion without us dictating to them. At the end of our one-hour workshop, we were able to agree on just two primary audience groups.
Two websites instead of one
HopeSprings Counseling Services is an offshoot of Cunningham, and their offerings were included on the main site. The target audience for HopeSprings has distinctly different needs than the other core audiences. For this reason, we decided to build a separate site for HopeSprings that would use a variation of the Cunningham color palette and the same content components. This way, the site would have a clear visual connection to the main site, and we’d stay under budget.
Content components for consistency and easy authoring
The old Cunningham Content Management System (CMS) didn’t have many reusable content components, which led to a lot of inconsistency across the site as authors tried to cobble together content ad hoc. Following a content-first approach, we created a set of components that served documented content needs. We didn’t invest time in anything that didn’t have a strong repeatable use case. Now, link cards and content features look the same every time, and getting a page published is much easier.
Content author training
We never want to hand off a shiny new website without sharing writing for the web best practices. The client is going to be the one to maintain the website over time, and they can quickly fall into the same bad patterns. If they don’t have a plan for moving forward, the redesign will fall flat quickly. We heard from the client that they learn best by doing, so we implemented a two-part training strategy. We spent time educating the Cunningham team on topics such as accessibility, SEO, readability, and content governance. Then, we conducted hands-on workshops where everyone created pages in real time, employing the strategies and techniques that we had taught them.
The result: A modern and engaging website that is easy to update
Cunningham’s content process is more streamlined and sustainable. We built in consistency to their CMS, so they no longer have to reinvent the wheel every time they need a new page. This consistency can also be seen on the front end, which has resulted in a more professional and trustworthy website. Most importantly, though, Cunningham content authors and web team members now have the skills and knowledge to continue their commitment to service-oriented and user-friendly web content. They have used these new skills to write service pages that are clear and easy to read, targeting those audiences that need the most support. Pixo is so proud to have helped them reach their goals.