A Place to Call Home
Content Design to effectively communicate a nonprofit's mission, vision, & impact.
Includes content audit, branding guidelines, & photography.
About
ACCESS is a nonprofit that welcomes & empowers low-income Chinese immigrant families in Boston through after-school care & community education.
Business Goals
50%
of ACCESS' revenue depends on donations, but the website was underutilized as a tool for giving. Most donations were made by check via mail or in person.
The Content Problems
The original site failed to communicate who ACCESS was in an easy-to-understand way.
The text provided neither context nor value to the site visitors and ineffectively called for donations. The PayPal form itself had typos that decreased users' trust in the website as a viable means of giving.
The Solution
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Define ACCESS' Mission, Vision, & Values in a clear, concise, & helpful way.
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Define ACCESS' brand for clarity, consistency, & to build trust with site visitors.
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Create Branding Guidelines to help stakeholders communicate a clear & consistent message.
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Create content that communicates ACCESS' impact in an easily digestible way. Ideally, all content will inspire action, either to donate or volunteer.
My Role
UX Research
UX Design
Branding
UX Writing
Content Creation
Photography
Tools
Figma
Miro
Photoshop
WIX (client-desired platform)
Timeline
May - June 2021
Launched June 18, 2021
Shameless Self Plug :)
"Kim is a talented & dedicated professional. She interviewed many people and took serious consideration of their feedback, input, & even criticism. She worked closely with ACCESS teams through personal interviews, group meetings, email communication, and in-person visitation. And finally, after all of her hard work, we now have our new website, and it is accessible both in English and Chinese."
- Pasang Drolma,
Executive Director of ACCESS
Research & Discovery
a. What do the Stakeholders want to communicate?
"I want the website to communicate who ACCESS is & what we do. I want it to capture people's eyes and hearts."
Pasang Drolma, Executive Director
"I would just like updated information. No one knows how to update the website here. It just feels cluttered even though things are sectioned off."
Annie Tran, Program Director
"The website just feels outdated. These photos are from like 5-6 years ago."
Erika Mei, Long-Term Volunteer
b. What do other nonprofit websites do? Why?
I researched best practices & conducted a competitive analysis, collecting all the data into post-its on Miro.
I also interviewed a web designer with 10 years experience in designing for nonprofits who summed up all my research nicely:
"Engage first the heart, then the head, then the hands."
-Elijah, experienced nonprofit designer
Establish the Brand
Research that Leads to Easier Brand Creation
Because my research process was fairly thorough (hooray), the brand guidelines went from a Google doc draft to the final pdf with only a few minor changes.
Write, Test, Iterate
1. Engage the heart
After creating user personas, task flows, & user flows (see UX case study), I hosted a collaborative ideation session with the stakeholders for the tagline.
I shared some quotes from the usability tests to help them understand the current content problems, then showed them some good examples to strive for, discussing reasons why.
After reviewing the brand guidelines, I encouraged them to come up with as many ideas as possible to take ownership of the words that meant the most to them & their organization.
Breaking barriers.
Building relationships.
2. Engage the head
In an easy-to-digest way. No walls of text, no big words, but big on impact, using the communication principles.
Also, this section needed to be easy for stakeholders to update, so I used Canva.
I tested the stats draft on 4 people because communication is always about the person on the receiving end. The stats section went through 4 iterations. Here is the final:
3. Engaging the hands:
See the donation form design in my UX Design case study.
Photography
Photography with Purpose
Showing ACCESS' mission in action.
It was a privilege to spend two days photographing ACCESS in action. I hoped these images would better capture & communicate who ACCESS is and the value they bring to their neighborhood.
After-School Care for
Families in Need
Creating Community through Art & Fitness Classes
Site Launch!
Translation & Lift-Off
Thanks to WIX's handy-dandy language option, Google Translate did most of the translating work, making it easy for the Executive Director to do final translation edits. Wrap-up went quickly & the site was launched on June 18, 2021.
The Results (ICYMI)
90%
less emails asking if ACCESS is a Chinese language school, saving directors time & effort
30%
increase in PayPal donations
100%
Staff & board members feel that the new site is a significant improvement in communicating ACCESS' value, vision, & impact.
The Next Steps
Social Marketing
In order to truly grow in a business sense, I encouraged a social marketing campaign & increase in social content creation. Since I couldn't do it myself due to limited time, I created a position for a marketing volunteer position, & hope to volunteer myself when my schedule opens up.
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