In my time as creative director at 270 Strategies, we created dozens of websites for organizations large and small. This one always stuck out for me — not only because I designed it, as opposed to simply providing creative direction for our talented team, but also because I felt it really did what it was meant to do.
The American Jewish World Service is a tremendous organization fighting to end poverty and promote human rights in the developing world. They don’t just throw money at problems. They get to know the local organizations making a difference on the ground, and provide them with the support they need to do even more good for their communities.
As a result, they have an endless bounty of stories of heroism and struggle and lives changed. When we visited their office in New York, we were blown away by the award-level photography covering their walls from their various projects and trips. That humanity was a big part of what was missing from their site. So we set out to make those real people and human stories the currency of the site, and to make sure their supporters understood the role they could play in the bigger story.
As any good organizer knows, the story is part of it, but the metrics matter too. While putting the content first, we focused on ensuring that the website was organized intuitively and built a user experience that would serve their diverse audiences well. We completely overhauled their engagement and donation pages — to increase conversion rates, and improve performance — possibly pushing my CRM nemesis, Blackbaud Luminate, as far as it has ever gone.
The way AJWS approaches their work is different from a lot of organizations out there, and it was a priority for them to make it dead easy to understand their approach. I love animations for making the complex simple, and we were thrilled they took our recommendation to partner with our buddy Ian Sigmon from Gunner to produce this gem.