Statewide Elder Care
LeadingAge Minnesota
Leading Age Minnesota ("LAMN") is a nonprofit association, working on behalf of member organizations who serve Minnesota seniors.
Their website is the hub of all their operations, designed to assist LeadingAge members. But the old website was dated, hard to navigate and not very effective for users. It was time for redesign, and LAMN went looking for a partner to help with the rebuild.
We began the project with an extensive discovery phase, including content strategy.
First our team inventoried the existing site content, measuring it against site analytics and click tracking, and determining what was performing well and what was not. We surveys key department stakeholders for insights, and held project workshops to explore audience, goals and content guidelines.
The existing site navigation was reworked to better serve members, adding new sections like a Resource Library, while eliminating underperforming and little-used content. The new sitemap was tested against real-life users using the online tool Treejack testing, and adjusted based on results before finalizing. Final results of our strategy work was complied into a strategic brief.
From strategy we moved on to design. Our team produced a series of wireframes for key landing pages of the site, exploring content, layout and content hierarchy. Building on the existing brand, our designers produced a new design direction and system for the website, from color and type to layout and image treatments.
Electric Citizen works with open-source tools like Drupal or WordPress for most of our projects. This project was different, however.
LAMN had been running their website on a lesser-known CMS called Expression Engine ("EE") for years, and had no desire to change. While EC will often recommend a move to Drupal for the advantage of that CMS, we decided early on that there would be little benefit to the client to make this switch. Their team had the internal expertise in EE, and would be managing the site after the redesign.
Instead of switching, we adapted quickly to using the client's preferred CMS. EE was still PHP-based and had an open-source version, so it wasn't entirely foreign to our team. We did have to learn on the fly, however, how to build out the various tools and components we typically use on new builds, this time in a new templating language.
We were able to upgrade the site to the latest version of EE, and introduce a number of new plugins to help the client with content management in the future. It wasn't enough to make our team want to switch from our regular set of tools. But it was a great example of how we were able to learn and adapt to new tools for our clients.
LAMN is a member-based organization, with a large amount of content and resources available only to paid members. The website needed to support these tools, as well as connect with a third-party CRM (Salesforce) in the process.
Using tagged data imported from Salesforce, we were able to deliver the most relevant content to members, based on their role and industry. This level of personalization was designed to make the site most useful to members, who come from a wide range of backgrounds and specializations within the overall umbrella of elder care.
