Communities In Schools (CIS) Redesign

The Client

Communities In Schools

Communities In Schools is a non-profit that seeks to help vulnerable students stay in school and succeed in life by identifying student needs and bringing outside resources inside the classroom. They work with over 2,500 schools across 25 states.

The Task

Communities In Schools approached Imaginary Landscape for a site redesign that focused on generating email leads and driving donations. They provided specific goals to increase brand and digital engagement and enhance operations by acquiring new donors.

The Homepage Design

The homepage design presents users with the story of the challenges students face, the solutions CIS provides, and the impact of their work. This is done through the use of engaging video content and animated statistics that highlight their achievements. News and stories are also prominently displayed throughout the homepage to further the message and mission of CIS.

To address the desire for more donations, users are given multiple opportunities to give through various means: a donate button in the main navigation, a donation bar at the top of the homepage that allows the user to first select the donation amount, and a sticky side bar donate button that opens the donation form in a pop-up modal.

Email captures were underperforming in the past because the original design required the user to go to a separate page to provide their email address for newsletter sign-up. The redesign places the newsletter sign-up form above the footer so that it is easy to access and is found on every page of the website.

Articles Application

Originally, CIS had five separate applications for News, Press, Stories, Publications, and Blogs. Most of these applications were using the same fields to present similar content. To streamline the process for content editors using the CMS, Imaginary combined all five applications into one app called “Articles”.

I built the mock-ups for the backend admin views in Django CMS and also helped design the front-end UI of the “News and Stories” landing page. The admin mockups were used as specs for the programmers as they built the custom application but also to show the client how article content would be more easily managed in the backend with a single application for all article types. Additionally, I built a spreadsheet that mapped the fields from the old applications to the fields of the new article app in order for the programmers to build a migration script for the data.