Community Foundation of Abilene

The Community Foundation of Abilene connects donors to causes they care about, creating grants aligned with their interests. They have awarded over $100m in grants to support charitable causes.

Back in 2018 we teamed up with Emerald, CFA’s marketing & communications director, to bring their newly refreshed brand online. Five years later Emerald found herself with a new challenge: the foundation has grown to serve a wider audience with differing requirements. How could she make sure the website guided people to the information they needed? And how could the website continue to handle an ever-expanding range of content?

Discovery is always worthwhile

We’re proud of our process, which includes a thorough discovery and planning phase. Experience has taught us that it’s always worth investing time in this stage – it creates a deeper shared understanding of requirements, helps uncover any sticky problems, and gets everyone on the same page.

In this case we worked closely with Emerald to understand CFA’s audiences and figure out their unique needs. We used this to decide on key messages for each audience, and how best to guide them to the information they seek.

All this fed into streamlined user flows with a reworked site map, updated navigation and a flexible system for authors to create signposts and calls to action.

Prioritizing needn’t mean settling

We understand that projects all have constraints. CFA initially wanted a full redesign but were concerned their budget might mean disappointing results. But during discovery we realized the crux of the project was actually more about the website being able to handle a wider range of content, rather than needing visual overhaul.

We all agreed a full redesign from scratch wasn’t required. Instead, we built on their existing design, refreshing rather than re-inventing. This let us invest more time into building a comprehensive library of re-usable components – hero sliders, calls to action, cards, forms and more. Now authors have the building blocks to build any type of page as their content needs change; a much better return on CFA’s investment.

Project highlights

The main lesson we were reminded of during this project? Given time early on to establish understanding, we can come up with creative solutions which make the best use of your budget; you might be pleasantly surprised with what’s possible.

• Long term partners, evolving their website as needs change
• Discovery phase meant we understood goals and could prioritize budget effectively
• Users say it's now much easier to find content they’re looking for
• CFA report that improved forms and content structure have cut calls to office – better for everyone!