The Nonprofit Association of Oregon (NAO) – a statewide nonprofit membership organization representing and supporting charitable nonprofits of all sizes, geographic locations, and missions across Oregon – reached out to Radish Lab to overhaul their website in tandem with creating a new brand. NAO’s existing website undersold the breadth of the resources they offer, obstructed membership flows, and limited the NAO team’s ability to update the site as their offerings and impact expanded.
With a robust discovery phase, NAO and the Radish Lab team identified key focus areas in the new experience and set out to build a new site that would better showcase NAO’s value-add to the community and drive new membership through a robust, filterable resource library, improve the experience for members through an updated membership flow and portal, and leverage an easy-to-use CMS to make maintaining their Wordpress website easier.
Ensuring a seamless user experience, whether for people just discovering NAO’s work or veteran members returning for new resources, was the overarching goal of their new site. Making sweeping improvements to information architecture, horizontal navigation, taxonomies, and breakpoints, the Radish Lab team centered users at every level of the experience.
During the sitemap and wireframe phases, we improved information architecture and created intuitive user journeys for existing and prospective members. We also overhauled horizontal navigation across the experience to enable users to quickly find what they need and discover new content.
As with all Radish Lab websites, we designed NAO’s new site to be thoughtfully responsive across multiple breakpoints, prioritizing mobile to ensure users on the go enjoy a smooth, intuitive experience.
The Nonprofit Association of Oregon has always offered a rich set of resources, but their old site struggled to showcase them in a user-friendly way and lacked taxonomies to help users filter, search and find relevant resources. Radish transformed NAO’s resources from sporadic lists of links into a robust, one-stop-shop resource library.
Building one central resource library that consolidated all resource types in an easy to navigate, filterable, and searchable format was integral to the improved user experience. It also allowed NAO to clearly showcase the open source and member-only content side by side to help drive new membership. And with new and improved taxonomies, incorporating featured and related resources site wide became an easy way to leverage their library throughout the experience. A new “I’m interested in …” module on their homepage serves as an easy entry point for prospective members to quickly see the wide array of resource types, topics, and support that NAO offers. Working with a site as large and resource-dense and NAO’s, the Radish Lab team paid especially close attention to creating a clear through line between User Experience, Taxonomies, and User Interface.
The Nonprofit Association of Oregon provides many free, open source resources to the nonprofit community, but their paid members get access to additional resources, events, community engagement opportunities, and more. Improving the flow for current members and driving conversion for new members were key goals for the new website.
On NAO’s old site, information about membership was dispersed across many pages, making it a challenge for prospective members to understand and compare their options. We also heard from current members that it was hard to navigate around the website and membership portal when logged in. Creating one Membership page with an easy-to-navigate tab system allows users to toggle between membership offerings to decide what option best fits their needs. With an improved user interface and clarified language, Radish Lab upgraded the full Membership flow, from sign-up entry points to the Membership portal and dashboard.
To enhance NAO’s event and member management capabilities, we integrated their existing CiviCRM system into the new site, ensuring seamless data retention. CiviCRM, a powerful open-source CRM for nonprofit organizations, enabled us to maintain all member and event data, ensuring uninterrupted access to member accounts. NAO’s previous site was built on Drupal, requiring thoughtful considerations when migrating CiviCRM content into the new Wordpress site.
By leveraging our WordPress base and bespoke coding, we transformed the sometimes limiting CiviCRM interface into engaging and intuitive user experiences. This included interactive calendars, customizable event templates suitable for small workshops or multi-day conferences, and vibrant visuals that align with NAO’s branding.
These enhancements not only preserved the robust functionality of CiviCRM but also significantly improved the aesthetic and usability aspects of NAO’s event pages and member portals.
Accessibility was a major concern for The Nonprofit Association of Oregon on their existing site, as their color palette and page templates frequently failed contrast testing. NAO and Radish believe every user deserves to have a great experience, so following the Radish standard of accessible-first design practices, we ensured NAO’s new site is WCAG AA compliant.
Leveraging both sides of Radish Lab’s offerings, NAO brought Radish on to rebuild their brand in tandem with the new website. This allowed the Radish team to integrate both processes seamlessly, resulting in a digital-first brand that was built AA compliant from the ground up.
