Amplify your mission
The mission of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation (SFAF) is to promote health, wellness, and social justice for communities most impacted by HIV. Their services include testing, treatment, support groups, and more. With multiple locations and dozens of events each month, SFAF needed to bring together multiple sites to give a clearer picture of everything they offer to their community.
After working together to rebrand their Tribute Gala event website, we began a full website design and development process for their main site. Our goal as SFAF’s partner was to bring together content from multiple websites under one roof. Their different events were being promoted in different places, and it was hard for anyone to get a comprehensive view of everything at once. It was also challenging for staff to manage all the different sites.
SFAF has a broad mission and serves many communities. To meet everyone’s needs we began this project with an in-person discovery meeting with stakeholders from each department. Because SFAF needed input and buy-in from across the organization we also circulated an online survey and feedback form. This ensured that all voices were heard and that the final product would meet everyone’s needs.
The new SFAF website unifies the organization’s brand and organized programs, services, and content in an easy to navigate architecture. Design features include gradient color schemes and paralax scrolling over images to give the site a modern feel. Mobile layouts make it easy to swipe through content and search for resources. Having photos that represent their communities is a good indicator that the site belongs to the organization.
Custom templates for SFAF’s blog and resource library allow visitors to their site to get exactly what they need by sorting content by topic, audience, and date of publication—or performing a keyword search. Related content logic invites users to explore further reading and engage with the wealth of high-quality content the SFAF team produces on everything from the latest HIV research to sexual health and wellness.
Combining five different websites into a single branded property was a huge undertaking and we had never managed a site redesign at this scale. Firefly Partners led a process that was clear and effective, and our project manager provided strong advice and guidance every step of the way. We produced a beautiful site. The flexible content modules make it easy to build out pages and promote dynamic content across the site, and a gorgeous menu makes it easy for site visitors to learn what services we offer and how they can get involved.
We used modular design for the entire site. This means that instead of building a wide array of rigid page templates, we built just a few. Within these pages are different content blocks, such as text blocks, full width images with a call-to-action, testimonials, statistics, or FAQ accordions. These elements can be added and rearranged to meet the specific needs of the SFAF team. For the website admins, drag and drop is all it takes to add more elements and content to each section of any page type. Custom post types for events, resources, staff profiles, and services made it easy to dynamically serve content throughout the site.
Providing direct services, programs, and events is at the heart of SFAF’s mission, so it was critical that we build a solution providing as many pathways to this information as possible. Customizing the Events Calendar Pro Plugin by Modern Tribe we built a calendar that can be viewed by day, week, or month, and that can be sorted by time, location, and type. Event details are also dynamically added to other sections of the website. No matter where a visitor is on the site, opportunities to get involved and find community are front and center.
To me, the SFAF website is an example of dynamic content done right. It feels like a living, breathing site. It took a lot of careful planning and mapping out of taxonomies to figure out how all the puzzle pieces fit together, but in the end the site allows users to digest content in intuitive ways and makes it easy for the the SFAF team to manage the site. The infrastructure of flexible content modules means the site can continue to evolve post launch as the organization's programs grow and its mission evolves.
Your nonprofit’s website needs to be easy to manage for your team and simple to navigate for your visitors. As your mission evolves and as you add programs, your site should be able to grow with your organization, not hold you back. The ability to build custom yet manageable sites for progressive nonprofits is Firefly Partners’ specialty. If you’re ready to think about a website redesign, complete this form to set up a free consultation with our team of digital marketing experts.