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By Forum One on
Working in more than 40 countries, Mercy Corps is a leading global humanitarian aid organization that empowers people to survive through crises, build better lives, and transform their communities for good. Forum One is working with Mercy Corps as a long-term strategic partner to prioritize and realize ongoing improvements to their digital presence to grow the impact of their work.
We recently redesigned the Mercy Corps homepage to reinforce their brand and highlight the impact of their work through powerful storytelling, and created custom campaign tools to make it easier for users to engage, donate, and volunteer. The new digital presence puts Mercy Corps’ work front and center, and strengthens their ability to respond immediately to global events by giving users clear and intuitive calls to action.
Why Drupal was chosen:
Mercycorps.org has been a long-standing Drupal site, which had a Drupal 6 then 7 version before Mercy Corps began working with Forum One. Forum One worked with Mercy Corps to add new features to the site that improved user engagement and brought the site to a modern look and feel.
Designing Around a Shared Vision
Our creative strategy team held in-person workshops with nearly a dozen stakeholders to understand Mercy Corps’ mission, strategic organizational goals, and top needs and priorities. We also applied insights our team members gained from embedding with Mercy Corps staff on the ground to see how they work, and from conducting in-depth technical assessments of each of their websites.
We carried this highly collaborative approach into our internal design phase. Our UX and design leads worked together to sketch and refine the content structure and visual design mockups for the new homepage at the same time. By showing stakeholders the structure and design side by side, we saved time and presented a broader vision for the new site.
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
Meeting Immediate Needs and Long-Term Goals
The homepage redesign is just the latest phase of our work with Mercy Corp to guide ongoing performance and usability improvements. So far we have enhanced site stability during the traffic spikes that accompany emergencies, such as the devastating earthquakes in Nepal. We also developed the new homepage in Drupal to be fully configurable by Mercy Corps’ team to change and rearrange images, background colors, and featured elements to keep up with their content priorities and branding guidelines.
Custom Campaign Tools to Respond to Events and Reach New Donors
Forum One designed and implemented pledge pages, a new content type we created in Drupal that gives Mercy Corps the ultimate flexibility to target their messages and react quickly to new developments around the world. For example, Mercy Corps recently used the pledge pages to collect messages of support for its field workers in Syria responding to the conflict in Aleppo. Mercy Corps’ team can easily add custom messages to these pages, switch between U.S. and U.K. versions, and add a post-pledge call to action to donate, share, or subscribe to a relevant newsletter. If a user ultimately makes a donation, we pass all the information they entered in the pledge page through to the donate form, so they have less to fill out to complete their donation.
We also created templates for search landing pages to increase donations by converting new potential donors searching the web for a related topic. We designed U.S. and U.K. versions of these as well, and a user-friendly giving experience with integrated donation forms. We’ve also given Mercy Corps the option to feature photos and YouTube videos on these pages, and provided social media integration for easy sharing and ongoing engagement.
Technical specifications
Drupal version:
Drupal 7.x
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
The goal of the Homepage redesign was to provide the Mercy Corps digital team with as much flexibility as possible, to alter the appearance of their homepage, without the need for developer support. To this end, The Forum One team used a combination of the Panels, Fieldable panel panes, Display suite the Color field modules that would provide a robust interface to site administrators. Panels is a great tool to allow fine control over the layout of pages as well as to serve up variants depending on contexts. In this case, the Mercy Corps team is able to easily manage separate home pages for different regions. Fieldable panel panes provided the ability to attach unique content to each panel pane, or element on a page, which was further enhanced by the color field module, which gave administrators the power to alter the color of those elements. Furthermore, the Display suite module’s ability to render entities in flexible ways allowed for robust responsive layout done largely via the interface with some light css.
Organizations involved:
Project team:
Mercy Corps - https://www.mercycorps.org/
Joey Tackett
Jeff Smith
Corinne Stubbs
Sectors:
Non-profit
