Modular components from the new ACF website

The Arizona Community Foundation is one of the largest community foundations in the United States and has a complex story and a broad variety of audiences.

ACF’s website had built up organically over time, without a strategic lens. The content management system was too limiting and hard to use. It was time to rethink the site and build an audience-focused experience that also worked well for their internal teams. We rebuilt their site from the ground up with a simpler brand story and curated experiences for a myriad of audience types and donors.
The first task in this project was to identify what different audiences want from the ACF website. We mapped their need states on a spectrum to prioritize content.
Graphic of page hierarchy, from broad to specific content, starting with the homepage and flowing all the way down to utility pages
We created a hierarchical structure for content and user pathways that allowed visitors to start at a high level and drill down into deeper content.
GIF of various page type heroes and modular designs

Focusing on the audience

Clear, simple pathways and a revamped visual hierarchy

Community foundations are complex because they have to be experts on the community, philanthropy, customer service, and much more. With this much complexity, communications can easily get caught in siloes. Our strategy hinged on the fact that the website is only one part of a holistic brand journey. The experience needs to tell a broad, clear story about the organization while also serving up simple pathways for each audience to easily find specific content.
Web style guide for ACF
Mobile CTA experience

Defining the experience goals 

Delightfully responsive

Interactions, designs, exhibit delightful moments of responsiveness, speaking to ACF’s laser focus on being adaptive to the needs of Arizonans.

Reflective

The site design and user experience reflect back to visitors the beautiful diversity and differences that make Arizona a great place to live. The visual design of the site is clean, beautiful, and puts the focus squarely on the content. 

Warm

The designs should give a distinct feeling of warmth and care.

Non-corporate

Even though ACF is a $1.5B organization, they are different from other donor-advised fund administrators like Schwab and Fidelity. ACF should feel a lot more accessible.
Various customs modules in both desktop and mobile form
A selection of modular components from the website.

Creating a modular, flexible storytelling system

ACF’s website is built on a system of custom modular components that can be used to construct unique pages. We built a variety of themes for certain components using background colors and imagery to create a diverse visual experience across the website. We designed and built this intricate system to be a flexible tool for the communications team while ensuring that components work together visually.

Storytelling is a key tenet of the website. We designed flexible Story Block modules that can be added to a page. These special modules allow the ACF team to share small story quotes or longer multimedia-rich stories from their community about the impact of their work. And with the theming engine we built, they can bring in even more visual variety that reflects the landscape, flora, and fauna of the state.
Story blocks let ACF highlight community stories throughout the site
In the back-end of the website, the ACF team can select the layout, color theme, and background image with a simple pulldown selection menu.
The complex impact area call to action offers an engaging interactive experience on desktop with a customized, leaner experience on mobile.
ACF website mobile experience

Guidelines for maintenance and smart growth

For this site, we built a custom WordPress implementation that uses Custom Post Types to make it easy to maintain news, events, publications, grants & scholarship, and staff & board pages. We worked with a variety of third-party integrations so that ACF could keep using their current technology.

We also delivered a full set of documentation, including a user guide and a library of custom screencasts to document the strategic reasoning behind the site and to ensure that future members of the team have access to the knowledge base.
Filtering options for custom modules
The news page features custom taxonomies and filtering.
Events block mobile experience
We integrated third-party event information into the site, including a handy feature that makes events disappear automatically after the day of the event passes, minimizing content maintenance.
Thumbnails of video screencasts guides for content management in the website backend
Snippets from the Website User Guide documentation

Designing and launching our new website was the capstone of a major, two-year technology overhaul. Our website had to project clearly and powerfully what we had become, and where we were going. Smith & Connors captured exactly what we hoped. Team players from the start, they excelled at listening and learning, ultimately translating everything they absorbed into our new site. They got us, we got them, and then they executed flawlessly. We could not be more pleased with the final product and the collaboration that led us here.
Headshot of Steve Seleznow

Project Scope

  • Change Management
  • Interviews
  • Staff Engagement
  • Surveys
  • Workshops & Focus Groups
  • Content Development
  • Content Strategy
  • Documentation
  • SEO Strategy & Optimization
  • Web Design & Development
A Black woman smiling with eyes closed against blue backdrop, gold border and JOBL brand bug in corner.
The Justice Oregon brand style guide, featuring the new brand palette and logo.

Let’s make something great together.