Brief
Greater Houston Community Foundation is dedicated to igniting meaningful and positive change throughout the Houston area. To achieve this, they needed a website that had a clear developmental focus, providing a concise story of who they are and encouraging philanthropists to open a donor advised fund with them.
The challenge
As an evolving organization with a deep history and even deeper capabilities, Greater Houston Community Foundation has a lot to offer — and even more to explain.
In addition to promoting their renowned work in community philanthropy, the Greater Houston Community Foundation also needed to elevate their donor advised fund services through a new online application process to be backed by persistent calls to action and thoughtful optimization across more than 30 pages.
How we did it
1. Creating a web experience to match evolving business objectives
Previously, Greater Houston Community Foundation’s had primarily served as a hub for established donors to login to their donor advised fund. With their new site, the Foundation needed a hub for all things philanthropy — a place where anyone could make sense of the work they do and open an account with zero friction in between.
2. Bringing an offline brand to life online
We restructured and refined the existing typography to ensure readability, incorporating handwritten text and human faces at key points to help the Foundation maintain a personal touch in an online setting.
Each of our content-rich service pages balances search-optimized, informative content with the personal touch that defines the Foundation, rounded out with a persistent call to action inviting you to get in touch with the actual person there to solve your challenges.
Further content was structured to mirror offline brand executions including annual reports and brochures that had featured an updated version of the branding that had yet to be truly reflected online.
3. A streamlined process for a complex form
The new Greater Houston Community Foundation website also introduced the ability for prospective donors to open a fund online using an easy-to-find form, linked prominently throughout the site.
The form itself is intuitive, elegant, and minimalistic, gently easing the user throughout the form fields and proving that opening a fund is in fact a simple process.
4. Accessible and user-friendly — inside and out
The evolution that made a new website necessary isn’t likely to stop anytime soon. To help our client keep their website growing and scaling alongside their business, we set up a CMS that makes it easy for Foundation employees to push updates. We worked to set our clients up for success by assembling an easy-to-follow training guide, and conducting a live tutorial for making updates to the site.
Additionally, every component of the site was built to accessibility standards, including accommodations for those who navigate the web solely by keyboard, those who rely on screen readers and other differently abled users in accordance with W3C standards.
