Friends Committee on National Legislation
Challenge
The voice for peace, justice, and an earth restored The Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL), a Quaker lobby in the public interest, needed a new, modern website to engage a variety of audiences around issues that matter. Threespot helped them find technology solutions that make creating aesthetically-pleasing webpages easy for staff, so that providing FCNL’s audience of advocates and volunteers with the information and tools they need has never been easier.
Solution
We invested time up-front in understanding FCNL’s editorial process and workflows so that we could build a back-end content management system (CMS) that would meet their long-term needs. Together with FCNL staff, we determined that a custom system built on the open-source Ruby on Rails framework would simplify editorial workflows, so that staff would no longer avoid publishing content because of prohibitive time investments required. After we developed and documented the system, then trained their team on its use, FCNL handled all content migration without needing any additional support. We simplified FCNL’s site navigation and information architecture to remove barriers between supporters and the content they expect from FCNL. Both long-time supporters and new visitors can quickly understand the organization and its mission, and with one click, find the content they are seeking in a single location. Filters for issue, resource type, and audience further enhance visitors’ ability to locate critical information, and a photography-light design focuses visitors on the content while minimizing editorial efforts to keep the site updated. Before Threespot’s team restructured FCNL’s information architecture, even staff and site administrators had trouble finding content on the website. By reconsidering the site search user experience, Threespot was able to ensure that FCNL site visitors—both from inside and outside the organization—can quickly find the information and tools they’re looking for.
Results
+21% more visitors and +38% more returning visitors since launch With time consuming processes out of the way, FCNL staff was able to focus on publishing relevant and timely content which they could share to engage their email and social media audiences. New visitor bounce rate has dropped 13% Also, all visitors are viewing as just many pages and going as deeply into the site as before, but are doing it faster with the improved navigation. The average user now spends 10% less time finding the content they need. Search exits have decreased by 16% and time spent on the site after completing a search has improved by 13%.
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