ZURBwired
Resource Area For Teaching 2010
Where are they today?
RAFT (Resource Area for Teaching) was our winning nonprofit. They came to ZURB with the goal to fix the broken message and broken interaction on their website. This fit part of a larger effort to get more of their organization online to expand the reach of their materials and efforts.
Buoyed by their efforts over the past year, RAFT is making their website the center of their growth plans. By continually working on the web and iterating on their site's content and messaging, they've grown more confident to invest in their future online.
This is no small shift for them--their organization has always been anchored around hands-on learning at physical locations. It's amazing to think what the spark at ZURBwired has turned in to for them since.
An Inspired Team Got the Win
What was remarkable about our 2010 event was that we failed to launch the website by 8AM the next day! We all hoped and planned to succeed, but this did not deter the RAFT team in the slightest. Ed, David and the rest of the team got some rest, but then got right back to work and launched the very next week.
It was an amazing effort. Several thorny engineering problems and the threat of second-guessing or getting stuck fine-tuning content before launch did not deter them. We were so impressed with the way the RAFT team kept the can-do attitude from ZURBwired going, timeboxed their efforts, and kept their eyes on the goal!
Each year we find the biggest reward isn't anything we create on that day, but rather these lessons about goal-oriented teamwork and basic design techniques that carry an organization to bigger and better things on their own.
The Big Wins
Every year we know we'll end up doing something amazing online and in print, but we never quite know what the real problems are we'll be solving for the nonprofit or its constituents. This year was no different.
1. Setting Strategic Goals
Working with the RAFT leads we were able to quickly brainstorm and decide on four critical goals for today's efforts and particularly for the website. They included:
- Build awareness by answering the simple who, what, where, when and how of RAFT.
- Position RAFT as innovators of 21st century teachings skills and materials.
- Strengthening their community of educators, volunteers, donors, and providers.
- Recreate more of the member experience online through networking and communication skills.
2. Website Rewritten, Restructured, Redesigned, Re-everythinged!
Our most obvious effort was the visual redesign of the look and feel. The new design appeared simpler and more approachable at first glance and featured large imagery offset on top of a warm background reminiscent of the craft materails at RAFT's hands-on learning facilities.
But this visual change came on top of a radically restructured website that was simpler to grasp and navigate, as well as built with widespread SEO improvements to allow critical content to get indexed by Google. Once on the pages, people were greeted with an almost full rewrite of the site's copywriting that the team felt spoke more clearly and energetically of the program's purpose and benefits.
From a technical perspective, we re-engineered the Idea Sheet search functionality as well as the interface for using it--a critical piece of RAFT's goal to connect members with better content online. For the rest of the site we took a "do no harm" approach and ended up maintaining a lot of existing features rather than tackle the complicated and risky job of removing them.
3. Newsletter and Social Media
When you are improving a website it is easy to overlook the related pieces that also communicate with customers. We raised the issue of the newsletter with RAFT and decided to dive in to help make it consistent with the new site's look and feel as well as tone of voice.
To help make the newsletter and all RAFT communications more effective, we set it as part of a social media strategy we then coached them about engaging people and maintaining relationships through the blog, Facebook, Twitter and more. We set RAFT up with a suite of tools we find effective, including TweetDeck and Co-Tweet.
4. Annual Report, Stickers and Postcards
One last component of our effort was an ambitious attempt to redesign their annual report for their upcoming presentations to stakeholders throughout the organization. This was a little crazy given the time constraints, but we managed to pull off a slim version with inserts and stickers showing off RAFT's recent success and charting a course for the new year! We even did postcards to send as 'Thank You's' for volunteers, just for good measure!
