NARAL Pro-Choice America: Site Redesign
www.prochoiceamerica.org
NARAL Pro-Choice America selected Beaconfire to redesign its public Web site and implement a new content management system. The organization hoped to improve usability, encourage advocacy and constituent recruitment, while launching the organization's new brand campaign. The new platform has also solved a content management bottleneck by allowing publishing by non-technical staff. The new site now provides a more useful and engaging presentation of the organization's issues in support of their comprehensive re-branding initiative and name change.
The Challenge: NARAL Pro-Choice America is an advocacy organization focused on protecting women's right to choose while promoting policies and programs that improve women's health and make abortion less necessary. Having selected a dynamic content management system (CMS) to replace their former static site, the organization selected Beaconfire to configure and customize the system to their requirements. The project included creating the design, planning the site architecture, defining the workflow, implementing the design and structure in the system, training content contributors, and selecting a hosting partner. The organization selected Beaconfire for the project due to its breadth of technical, creative, and management capabilities.
The Solution: Beaconfire provided a software evaluation to select a content management system for the new site prior to starting the redesign effort. In addition to simply redesigning the NARAL Pro-Choice America site, the project required the implementation and configuration of several technologies and vendors including PaperThin's CommonSpot for content management, GetActive for donation processing, advocacy, and email communications and NI Solutions for hosting.
Beaconfire created a work plan for the project and helped the organization identify and prioritize its online audiences, document creative specifications, and create design concepts. A primary goal of the site design was to reinforce NARAL Pro-Choice America's longstanding position as the leader of a modern mainstream movement that is actively promoting women's reproductive rights.
In addition, Beaconfire led the selection of a hosting partner and provided oversight for the CMS installation and configuration. Once installed, Beaconfire configured the CMS to enable authoring permissions, set up a robust workflow, and created a structure for the site's information architecture. Beaconfire provided a range of customizations such as content reuse and an "email this article" feature. Beaconfire's customizations also enabled the organization to categorize their content for compliance with federal regulations and provided a means to update CMS-managed pages with data from the advocacy and newsletter-profiling tool. With the priorities relating to the mission front and center, and their new brand deployed online, the redesigned site offers the organization a more engaging, usable, and effective way to maintain its position as the leader in its field.