Raising Money for Our National parks

National Park Foundation

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The National Park Foundation (NPF) is the official non-profit for the National Park Service, whose mission is to raise money to help support programming that allows the public to enjoy these beautiful and historic sites. I uncovered several issues, and my goal became to provide a clear and intuitive experience for website visitors that allows them to understand the mission of the organization and to take action by donating to the parks.

Roles

  • Discovery & Research

  • Information Architecture

  • Wireframes

Discovery & Research

The first step in this process was sending out a survey to gain information about their audiences coming to the NPF website. The results surprised the client: even their own supporters were unsure how they were different than other charities in the space and how their contribution would make an impact. Looking at user search terms and user funnels in Google Analytics showed that users were coming to the site with the impression that they could get information about planning a trip to the parks. My first inclination was to remove that information, as it was misleading, but instead used it to our advantage. Since this was a major source of website traffic, I used this as the hook and then guided them through an immersive experience which provided information about NPF programming and a call-to-action that was directly related to the park the user was viewing. 

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Information Architecture

The initial structure of the site was inconsistent and hard to navigate. This was the result of the organization growing over time and haphazardly adding pages without user flows in mind. I revamped the structure in order to give the content hierarchy and implemented a taxonomy to make connections across the site. For example, using a park taxonomy, I was able to easily make connections between the NPF programming and National Parks.

Wireframes

The wireframes focused primarily on strategic user flows to entice users to take action. The main path the team focused on was: park information > program information > call-to-action. The website now showcases the beauty of our National Parks and guides visitors and provides opportunities to support the parks with a streamlined information architecture and clear calls-to-action. 

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Results

Within six months of launch, pageviews for NPF’s “Our Work” content increased by 78% and pageviews to “Programs” saw an increase of 297%. NPF has reported a 25% increase in the website’s findability within search engines, 20% improvement in revenue, and a 21% hike in the number of on-site transactions.