Multi-disciplinary Designer
MDC
Website Design, Rebrand
Role
Creative Director, Lead Designer (Agency: Literal Humans)
MDC is a large US-based nonprofit that focuses on economic empowerment and racial equity in South. MDC sought our assistance to help them roll out a full organizational rebrand and rebuild their website from the ground up.
THE
CHAL
LENGE
A common challenge for a lot of nonprofits — many of them do awesome work, but their websites look outdated and confusing. Every nonprofit’s primary goal is simple: gain supporters and turn them into funders who support the amazing work they’re doing. However, achieving this goal is difficult because communicating with the organization’s target audience is no easy task. A lot of the problems emerge from the website.
In MDC’s case, disorganized services and programs meant the website audiences had a hard time understanding the broader story MDC was trying to tell on its website. MDC struggled to demonstrate their value in a way that would encourage users to take action and donate.
Second, their site was outdated. Generally poor website information architecture meant there were multiple, inconsistent dropdowns and sidebar menus, and redundant site navigation. Even MDC’s own staff had trouble locating information on the site. In addition to improving the navigation, there was a clear need for modernized visual aesthetics — a more contemporary website to reflect MDC’s real impact in the modern world.
And finally, the old MDC site framed the organization primarily as a service provider. But in reality, MDC is more of a partner and a resource to the community and funders. They needed to change their story.
The
Solution
The website design and development involved several steps:
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Industry Immersion
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Competitive Audit
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Audience Analysis
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Website Strategy
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Information Architecture
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User Flows
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Wireframes
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Responsive Website Design
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Website Development
During the planning phase of the design project, we went through MDC’s lines of services, programs, and subsidiary organizations, and we helped them develop a clearer information architecture strategy to allow them to better communicate about their broad range of programs.
We also conducted a wide range of research, from audience interviews to competitive analysis and website analytic audits, to allow us to build an overarching strategy to guide the web rebuild process.
This website strategy allowed us to develop and stick to clear project objectives and allowed us to build a website structure that would flow the site’s various audience groups into the right places, and help them take the right actions.
As with most big website revamp projects, content migration can also be a huge challenge. To streamline the migration process as much as possible, the our team developed the site to match the structure of the old site as closely as possible, while incorporating new features from the new designs. This allowed us to automatically port over MDC’s existing content with WordPress’ built-in migration tools. We then thoroughly reviewed the content and manually corrected any content discrepancies and issues.
In the end, we helped MDC build a crisp, clear indication of what they do and who they are.
Ultimately, our collaborative efforts culminated in slick new site launch and complete rebrand that helped them to better communicate what they stand. In addition, we worked on providing a robust resource hub, bringing The State of the South, which used to be a standalone site, into the main website ecosystem. The web design was also to serve as a morale booster for staff — something they could be proud of. Our journey with MDC is proof of how you can take the many challenges that plague and often overwhelm nonprofits and turn them into something beautiful.
