A national website redesign that resulted in a flexible, focused website and platform.

United Way Centraide Canada National Website Redesign

United Way Centraide Canada’s mission is “to improve lives and build community by engaging individuals and mobilizing collective action.” UWCC is a major fixture in Canadian philanthropy; for nearly a century, they have been helping better lives in communities nationwide. Currently, United Way Centraide Canada is supporting 6,303 local community programs, and has 31,743,213 people living in UWCC communities. bv02 set out to assist UWCC to build a better engagement platform and help them reach a more people in need.

The Challenge

UWCC’s previous website lacked clarity and cohesion in delivering and communicating the organization’s mandate and value proposition.The previous website was not responsive, nor was it adaptable across all platforms and devices. It’s labeling was unclear and made information hard to find. Overall, the site confused and frustrated users; as a result, it couldn’t do what it was supposed to do:  provide users with a place where they could find information and be immersed in the UWC brand.

The new website was designed to provide easy access to information, be more flexible within the page templates, grant the ability to revise and update content in the CMS, and be adaptable and responsive across all platforms and devices. More importantly, the website would be accessible, engaging and clear about how people can take action and improve usability.

Project Goals

  1. Build a better marketing tool to demonstrate what UWC does and their impact
  2. Build a platform that is more adaptable to the needs of specific national marketing initiatives.
  3. Ability to express the brand story better through the website.
  4. Design a user-focused website, remove constraints, provide better controls over content management, and improve overall usability.

Our Approach

We have devised a unique approach to ensure the project’s success. Thorough research, starting with discovery, we ensured that all major business goals and objectives for UWC were addressed, understood and were a part of the decision-making for all aspects of the redesign.

We conducted a content workshop that included revised navigation and a card-sorting exercise. The goal of this was to make information more findable and discoverable, and labels more clear and understandable.

The UX strategy provided flexible, modular templates that content administrators can customize for annual national campaigns. Once the research and strategy was established, the site was designed to provide a visual and aesthetically-pleasing layer on top of the business strategy.

  1. Research: Discovery (Interviews), Content Strategy Workshop
  2. UX Strategy: Wireframes, Information Architecture
  3. Design: Mood Board, Layout and Web Design
  4. Technical Planning: Front-End Development,  Back-End Development, User Stories, Quality Assurance

The Results

In the end bv02, delivered a responsive website, focused on usability best practices, modular templates that could optimized for unique campaigns and clear messaging and calls-to-action. This provided a solid base for other United Way organizations to get online quicker and more efficiently.  

Solutions Provided