Jewish National Fund (JNF)
User Research, Information Architecture, Design, CMS Implementation
Jewish National Fund Design - BEFORE
The Challenge
Four years after the launch of its previous site, the Jewish National Fund (JNF) team realized that the organization had outgrown its website. In addition to an outdated
design, JNF.org had become an extremely large, content-heavy site without a scalable information architecture to support this valuable content.
Like their website, JNF as an organization had expanded in the breadth of its mission. Beyond planting trees in Israel and raising money through Blue Boxes, JNF had
become a premiere environmental research and action organization. JNF realized that it needed a website that demonstrated the scope of its vision – serving as
the “central U.S. address for all things Israel” – and that would be flexible enough to adapt to its evolving mission in the years to come. |
Jewish National Fund Wireframe
The Approach
After partnering with Convio for several years as the software platform for its full website, Jewish National Fund came to Convio in early 2008 to begin the process of re-architecting, re-designing, and re-building a wholly new user experience for JNF.org. Along with the decision to upgrade its several-thousand-page site from PageBuilder to Convio’s CMS platform, JNF asked us to insure that the new site would both effectively target its core audience groups – as well as attract a new, younger cohort of American Jews, helping the organization rebrand itself online with this demographic.
Our process started with intensive stakeholder interviews, followed by a lengthy user research phase. Convio performed an audience survey of JNF constituents and a site path analysis of JNF.org web traffic. Personas were created to help the team better understand and identify with their audiences and a card sort test was performed to help influence the new information architecture of the site. Through an extensive, rigorous user research plan, we analyzed each audience group, integrating findings to produce a clear picture of the behaviors, perceptions, attitudes, and needs of all targeted profiles. Then, using our new constituent personas as a decision-making framework, we developed a new information architecture, visual design, and interaction plan to meet both JNF’s organizational goals and its online community’s needs. |
The Outcome
Leveraging the best of what our Convio software suite has to offer, the new JNF.org, powered by our Content Management System and eCRM (constituent relationship management) tools, will launch in early January 2009, along with focused marketing tailored to each target audience group’s needs.
We at Convio are proud to report that our creative strategy offers a new online brand for Jewish National Fund and all of the audiences they appeal to today, which we confirmed directly with JNF’s constituents during usability testing of the new design. And the new JNF.org offers effective, personalized online interactions between constituents and the organization, allowing visitors to engage with the organization to do everything from manage their purchases of trees to be planted in Israel to communicate directly with the JNF branch in their area to receive dynamic content and messaging based on their areas of interest. |
