Jennifer Lauer Daniels of UWCR writes: "We won second place in United Way of Pennsylvania's 2004/2005 Communications Contest for best online communications."
This is one of the most successful projects we have ever been involved with. We can't claim as much credit for it as we'd like as UWCR is an incredibly well-run organization with extremely competent staff.
Before we began designing the site, UWCR had identified their various audiences (donors, nonprofits, people in need, volunteers), thought through how to address each of them, and organized the logical layout of the site.
In the several years the site has been running, they have updated content nearly every week, making this one of the most up-to-date sites we have ever been involved with.
This site is written in ASP on the IIS platform and is database-driven using a simple Access database as the complexity (and cost) of SQL Server was deemed unnecessary.
The design was updated a year or so after the site went live based on criteria from the national United Way, which dictates how logos can be used, which fonts are allowed, etc. Working within these very tight requirements, we were quite pleased at the design which we feel expresses how dynamic this particular organization is.
This site was designed to allow UWCR staff to update most of the content directly. For example, here on the home page, they can update the three top stories and their associated images, the links shown under Popular Choices, Publications, and Video Spotlight, and the mini-calendar.
If you visit their home page, you will see that it has been updated from the image shown above. They are very good about updating it regularly; we've never seen the same top stories more than once!
Updating the calender information not only updates it on the home page of the site, but on the calendar page located in their News & Events section, which is shown below.
The web-based update application is very simple and straight-forward as it was built to accomplish the things UWCR staff needed to do without a lot of extraneous complexity.
The links across the top of the page shown below allow a logged-in user to accomplish various things. For example, a Help manual is provided. We found that a short training with a handful of key personnel plus this manual was sufficient for their staff members to become proficient in using this simplified application.
If the administrator has logged in, she has access to the administrator menu, which allows her to do things like add new accounts, give permission to those who edit the various pages (for example, the Volunteer Coordinator edits the Volunteer section of the web site), and manage PDFs and images on the site (which may be in multiple pages throughout the site).
There are several specialized applications for things like updating the calendar within this update application. The main editing page, allowing a staff member to edit the page content and associated images and PDFs, is shown below.
The News Room illustrates one of the alternative methods of updating the site besides the page editor. This page simply lists any PDFs placed in a directory by UWCR staff. Several sections of the site work in this simple manner. We used a lot of PDFs in the site because UWCR had existing expertise in producing PDFs, allowing them to very easily update the site as they produced paper documents.
There are a few things, like web forms with JavaScript validation and server-side processing, that UWCR staff cannot update themselves. We continue to do maintenance work for them as needed each quarter to address these items. Our working relationship with them is one of the pleasures of being ornery-geeks!
Several years after we built the main site, UWCR decided to begin providing their various newsletters electronically to reduce printing costs. Thus the e-communications application was born.
Web visitors can sign up for a variety of newsletters on their web site.
The application was built to allow the production of both newsletters (regularly published documents containing multiple stories) and postcards (one-time documents to respond to current events with a brief single story).
The staff member creates a document, then uploads each story, which contains an image file, a short version of the text, and the full story text.
As in the case of the update application, the e-communications application is not a WYSWYIG application due to the desire to simplify it. However, staff members can preview their document as they are working on it.
This application includes both a review and an approval process. A staff member may request review from any other staff member, but final approval must be given by a Communications and Marketing staff member before the document before it is sent.
When a staff member produces a newsletter or postcard, the application produces three files: an HTML-version of the email based on a template, a text-only version of the email for those who do not use HTML-email, and an Excel file containing the email addresses the document should be sent to. These three files are used in conjunction with MyEmma to send the emails.
Newsletters that have been sent appear on the appropriate page of the UWCR web site.
To begin with, the main newsletter was sent via this system. Over time, the Volunteer Center newsletter and Women's Leadership Newsletter have begun to be sent this way as well.
In addition to saving on printing costs, this application allows for much faster communication with their constituents. Overall, it has been quite successful for them.
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