Bringing Stakeholders Together with a Flexible CMS
America’s premier name in charter schools, KIPP is big – in mission, in impact, and in scale. When KIPP briefed us on their website needs – an overhaul of their database-heavy site in a way that met the needs of a diverse range of stakeholders across the country – we could see from the start that it would a complex project. But there’s nothing worse than a complicated website that looks and feels complicated to the user. Luckily, making the complex appear simple — and beautiful — is one of Briteweb’s specialties.
A Diverse Audience With Unique Needs
KIPP‘s online audience is a diverse mix of teachers, job seekers, families, donors, media, and KIPP staff spread across the country. Each of those audiences’ unique needs had to be addressed in an intuitive, practical interface that allowed complexity in design while achieving simplicity in function.
The new website required a content management system (CMS) that was both user-friendly and flexible and it needed to be able to adapt and grow as the organization did. We also needed to migrate and consolidate extensive data from their existing site, and create a responsive design for mobile users. Perhaps most importantly (and most measurably), the new site needed to increase conversion rates across a broad variety of users and stakeholders.
The Process
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The Survey
We worked extensively with KIPP’s internal team, and engaged stakeholders from across the country, including funders, parents, students, alumni, teachers, recruiters, and school psychologists -- to understand how and why they use KIPP’s site, and what improvements would make their relationship with KIPP easier and more effective.
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Content-First Design
Using a content-first design approach, we created lists identifying the content elements required on each page, then used those lists to build out templates that addressed stakeholder needs – and facilitated conversion. To help KIPP meet their conversion goals, we focused on a design strategy with clear Calls to Action (CTAs) throughout the website. Each CTA was created to meet the specific needs of a particular user.
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A Flexible CMS
On the backend, the development process was as complex as we anticipated. Our development team rebuilt and redesigned KIPP’s web presence, upgrading them to a sophisticated but user-friendly content management system and adding functionality that better addressed user needs. Knowing their needs would change over time, we made sure their CMS would give them maximum flexibility in organizing and displaying their content while maintaining a cohesive and navigable overall design.
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Storytelling
While the technical aspects of the site were sophisticated, we made sure that level of complexity was hidden behind the scenes. What users actually experienced was a site they could navigate easily, with content that helped them connect to KIPP. The new content had an increased emphasis on sharing the stories of some of the tens of thousands of stakeholders – particularly students – whose lives have been changed by the efforts of this inspiring organization.
Key Features
Our measures of success are always directly related to our clients’ needs. In the case of KIPP, their clear requirements at project launch served as a checklist: Increased usability across a spectrum of stakeholders, improved conversion, migration and consolidation of data from existing site, responsive mobile design, a user-friendly and flexible CMS, and adapted HTML/CSS versions of the site, so the KIPP team can maintain a consistent look wherever they appear online, like on their custom Salesforce-hosted career site.
On this project our proudest development is the interactive map of KIPP schools, which we developed with a custom API integration, maximizing the usefulness of their external database(s) of regions and schools. By creating a custom, single-page application, and adding geocoding for users to search by zip code, we built an easy-to-use visual directory for KIPP’s schools nationwide.
