University of Florida Foundation is responsible for attracting public visibility to the university and creating a space that empowers people to make an impact. They do this by drawing attention to research projects, scholarships, and funds, and by establishing facilities that help improve the lives of the world’s citizens. I worked with the Foundation over several months to re-imagine and rebuild their giving process and construct a new digital home.
The design challenge for UF Foundation was designing and building the website in a way that could provide the Foundation with a set of tools to give them the flexibility they need to create well-branded robust stories and unique campaigns. Enter the page builder. The entire website is designed around flexible content pieces that can be reused with new content throughout the website without breaking the design.
The technical challenge for UF Foundation was threading the connection between large amounts of giving fund data, newly implemented storytelling, and the giving process without having to migrate all of the data manually. To achieve this, I built the new website on WordPress, the most widely used open-source content management system available, and created a plethora of taxonomy libraries that the Foundation could use to tie stories and specific funds together. This eliminated all of the confusion associated with the original platform. Now, the user is constantly aware of which fund he/she is giving to and the impact it will have. To automate the migration process, we were able to take the existing site data and export it as a CSV that we could then use alongside the WP All Import plugin to generate thousands of funds in a matter of minutes.
The website needed to accommodate a range of age demographics while also having the longevity to engage new generations for decades to come. This put mobile responsiveness as an extremely high priority. We also needed a giving form experience that could keep users hooked and allow them the freedom to explore all of the giving funds without having to leave the page or complete the form again. To solve this problem, I created a custom search engine for the funds and built the form into stages. This allows the user or development officers at the Foundation to complete parts of the form from different pages throughout the website.
My work with UF Foundation resulted in a 43.3% increase in web activity during their busiest time of the giving season. They’re on track to receive over 400,000 page views in the first year.
