We don’t mean to toot our own horn but we’re very proud of the work we did on the Madison-Area Urban Ministry (MUM) project and wanted to share our journey with you! As a results-oriented company, we were thrilled when, a year ago, Executive Director Linda Ketcham shared the impact that our work on her website had on her organization.
First things first, what is MUM, you might ask? MUM is a non-profit interfaith organization dedicated to helping people impacted by the criminal justice system. They have helped over 9,000 individuals and have a recidivism rate of under 5%.
While they were doing a great job on their own, they wanted to know how they could be making an even stronger impact, and so they came to us. One of their biggest challenges was figuring out how to stand out to the public in order to increase donations.
Given that they compete against 1.5 million other non-profits for donations, cutting through all that noise was definitely a hurdle. In addition to that, MUM was also looking to increase their retention rates for online donors, which at the time stood at 25%.
We at IHC love everything they stand for and was more than excited to take this project on! We took whole picture design marketing approach. We began with making information easy to find on their website.
Recognizing that users today are often in a time crunch, we restructured the website layout making commonly sought out information readily accessible. By doing so, MUM’s engagement increased by 30 times!
Next we looked at incorporating several call to actions on their website such as including a “Donate Now” icon. You’d be surprised by what a huge difference the smallest of changes can make.
In this case, not to brag or anything, but it increased donations by 800%! (okay, maybe we’re bragging a little, but hey, we take pride in our work!)
Throughout the entire website restructure process, we made sure to integrate their brand identity into the designs. We at IHC wanted to make sure users browsing through their site had every opportunity to connect on an emotional level with MUM. We also wanted MUM to be unique in order to stand out and truly make an impact.
What made this project so special to us was that it was validation that we had something great up our sleeve. Since then, we create principles for doing a website an named it IH5 Web, which has produced success with our other clients as well.
Working with MUM showed us how important it is to create marketing collateral to build a brand for clients as opposed to just a short term fix. We’ll also be taking this a step further by launching our IH5 Mobile and IH5 Branding principles set to launch later this year, and we’re excited to achieve great things with it!
When designing your website, be sure to keep the big picture in mind!
