Center for Civic Innovation

PROJECT OVERVIEW

The Center for Civic Innovation (CCI) is a non-profit organization that assists civic minded entrepreneurs, governments and other nonprofits in the city of Atlanta with coworking spaces, advisement and investment. However, while CCI’s energy and sense of mission are strong in-person, it was not translating into their online presence.

With this opportunity our team created a website content analysis with a focus on improving communication and outreach with new and returning users. By focusing on user experience and user centered design, our findings created a path to improved user engagement as well as an increase in revenue. We believe this would allow CCI the ability expand their mission more efficiently. With a team of designers, writers and developers we produced recommendations for improved information architecture, new content strategy and marketing materials.

IMPROVED INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

By eliminating redundant content and relocating specific subpages to more relevant primary pages we shrank the primary navigation, reducing friction.

To create a more intuitive hierarchy within the navigation we combined the Coworking and Membership pages in the primary navigation, creating an easier path to both actions. We believe that a positive coworking experience produced an organic path to membership and by combining the two pages we increased their visibility to their perspective audiences.  An increase in both areas will lead to higher revenues and higher growth potential.

During our final hierarchy phase we reorganized the subpages so that each page answered a question which could then be built upon by the next page. One of our main focuses was the About page, since it is an opportunity for CCI to introduce themselves and their mission to new users. By creating a new navigation hierarchy, readers could scan and make quicker decisions regarding the space without ever stepping inside it.

new content strategy

Our stakeholders challenged us during our initial meeting by asking us to retain as much content as possible while also focusing the user on important details and optimizing the content for an online audience.

The solution in our analysis was hyper focusing on what each paragraph was communicating and creating a method of highlighting or emboldening specific pieces of text that could communicate key points as well as stand alone.

Using this method, we found this allowed the user to quickly scan the page for the information they required without being bogged down in large bodies of text. In hallway testing users appreciated that the content had been summarized for their convenience, but also if they chose to read more in depth, the information was already provided without linking to another page.

refreshed marketing materials

Our Stakeholders needed to find a way to condense the Newsletter without losing content.

NEWSLETTER
The most glaring issue during our audit was the over all length of the Newsletter and how to further optimize it for a digital audience while keeping a majority of the content in place.

First, we shrank image and text sizes to quickly optimize the content to conform with mobile platforms. For Events, we recommended they condense them to only a four week period since they Newsletter is sent bi-weekly. We then linked the title, which sent the user back to the CCI website calendar where a more detailed description was waiting. In the Read + Listen section, we adopted the same approach by linking the title of the book or article to where they could be read or purchased. Our methods limited the length of the Newsletter considerably.