Convio Design Portfolio

Websites

Home for Little Wanderers - Website

Home for Little Wanderers BEFORE

The Challenge

The oldest agency of its kind in the U.S., the Home for Little Wanderers needed a website that would reflect its long history in serving children and their families in need. The Home also needed a look-and-feel that would better represent its offline brand and personality, balancing the seriousness of its core mission (the healthy emotional, mental and emotional development of children at risk) with the playfulness and fun that signify its commitment to kids. With a small staff and limited resources for maintaining TheHome.org, THLW expressed a practical need to set up an administrator experience that would allow for easy publishing of new content on the website, simple administration of the site navigation, and fresh presentation of new content – without having a full-time webmaster.

The Home for Little Wanderers team partnered with Convio to build their full new website, from information architecture to creating a successful online version of their established brand to implementing the  new website in Convio eCRM and PageBuilder from the ground up.

The Approach

Through a series of information architecture and creative strategy meetings, our Convio design team learned about all of the goals for the new user experience of TheHome.org, including the prioritization of many disparate audience groups with differing needs, from engaging supporters such as individual donors, corporations, and volunteers to educating visitors such as adoptive and foster parents, other agencies, and the media  to retaining constituents such as alumni of The Home.
Together, The Home and Convio developed a new content organization to balance all of these key needs and to offer strategic pathways into the site content for visitors with particular areas of focus or from particular populations. We outlined a new navigation plan to meet TheHome.org’s users’ needs, as well as the organization’s requirement of simple maintenance and flexibility.
In addition, we assessed many different models for successfully translating The Home for Little Wanderers’ offline identity into an effective online design that could be built to provide fresh content with low maintenance requirements – to allow The Home to spend more time focusing on kids and families.

The Outcome

The new and improved TheHome.org reflects both strategic organizational goals and critical audience needs. Our design puts The Home’s mission and its commitment to children front-and-center, offering targeted photos of kids and families which correspond to each key content area and feature on the site. In addition, The Home’s new user experience focuses audience members down three key interactive engagement pathways (donating, registering, and an engagement promotion that changes based on the time of year), offers general news and updates on the organization’s work, and allows for interesting interactive features like sending eCards and joining a social networking campaigns through Facebook.