The Conservation Alliance Website: Case Study

As the Creative and Digital Manager, I was TCA‘s keeper of the brand. For the website redesign, I brought my deep understanding of TCA’s brand to collaborate with external partners to shape a new site that showcased our brand’s evolution and solved for technical challenges.

My role was to ensure that the new site advanced TCA’s organizational goals and pushed the brand forwards, but also stayed true to our core DNA. As the website admin, I also was focused elevating on the back end user experience.

The site soft-launched in December 2022 and was built by True Blue Strategies. 
Here’s a before and after look at the homepage:

Brand evolution:

• The site didn’t portray the TCA accurately; felt like a “big green org”
• JEDI values were not coming through on the old site
• Politically, TCA’s coalition had broadened and an emphasis on bipartisanship was needed to make sure everyone felt included
• Membership-wise, the site primarily reflected outdoor industry brands. In reality, TCA members span many industries like craft brew, renewables, tech, consumables and more. It’s hard to recruit new industries if they can’t visualize themselves as belonging to your group.
• For potential brand partners, the new site would make it easier for someone to pitch a prospective investment in membership to their leadership
• To potential grantees, a new site would provide validation that TCA is a modern organization that can be a trusted partner

Technical:

• The old Wordpress site couldn’t be updated
• The site was not responsive
• Site would crash; requiring freelance dev time but no budget
• Site was not secure (https)
• Site was confusing to navigate as an outside user or staff member
• There were thousands of pages that were not being viewed
• Copy was redundant
• Content was hard to find and buried pages deep off the nav
• Updating the site was a labor-intensive process
• The back end was not intuitive
• Content was not templated; modules were hard to manipulate
• It was hard to create new pages that looked good
• Slider based header looked dated

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Goals for the site 

• Make it clean and modern
• Accurately portray TCA’s updated brand
• Make it back-end friendly: The site needs be easy for TCA staff to use
  
• Bring TCA’s justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion values to the foreground (Read more here)
• Represent of a conservation coalition of everyone