Every Texan envisions a Texas where people of all backgrounds can fulfill their potential and contribute to their community. The organization focuses on strengthening public policy to expand opportunity and equity for people of all backgrounds. They aim to help Texas citizens more easily and thoroughly understand, discuss, and make decisions about public policy. Every Texan offers the knowledge, solutions, and tools to help Texans thrive.
Playing an important role in fighting social injustice through public policies for 35 years, the Center for Public Policy Priorities knew broader brand awareness would be the key to its future success. While the organization was clear on its mission to strengthen public policies, an outdated and clunky website was preventing target audiences from clearly understanding the brand’s goal and message. Undergoing a rebranding and renaming, CPPP became Every Texan to better communicate its mission. As part of the rebranding process, CPPP selected HMG to design and develop a new website to support the brand’s new digital presence.
Strategy
Going into the web project, Every Texan’s goals were three-fold: effectively influence policy change, generate donor and advocate leads, and build a powerful brand. Once these clear goals were identified, the HMG team was able to map out user journeys for each target audience based on the user’s intent on the site. We knew this would require strategic messaging, restructuring of content, and redefined calls-to-action. As a robust site with thousands of resources, we focused much of our efforts on developing a simplified site map based on user behavior. This allowed us to streamline the content and create an overall improved user experience.
Design
Next, to determine the design direction for the site, we looked to Every Texan’s new branding guidelines, following the research-based color palettes, fonts, and imagery. We wanted to tie in custom elements and approachable illustrations to maintain a bright and playful feel throughout the site. For a fun and unique design element, we incorporated a section of Every Texan’s new logo as a flagship piece to bring congruency from page to page. We also represented Every Texans’ values of diversity and equality in all imagery throughout the site. Then, to better organize the many resource pages, we partnered with a content strategist for the site and page structure. We created a clean, updated navigation that ensures users will be able to easily find the content they need within 2-3 clicks.
Development
Every Texan’s team, including several staff members and volunteers, would be taking a hands-on role in maintaining the website. This meant it was crucial to find a simple way for team members to internally manage and update content on their own. In order to facilitate this, we selected WordPress as the CMS and incorporated the easy-to-use Elementor page builder. We also delivered several customized templates, making it a breeze to create and add new pages anytime.
Our greatest challenge was Every Texan’s blog, initially located under a separate site. In order to create a more seamless experience, we migrated all the content onto one site, making it easier to manage and enabling blog content to be integrated throughout other areas of the website. We then completed an integration with Every Texan’s selected donor management platform to simplify the donation functionality. The original site also lacked the tools to measure success, so we implemented Google Analytics to track performance and help us analyze the results.
Every Texan’s rebrand was catapulted with the addition of an updated digital presence. With a new look, more strategic messaging, and simplified architecture, the Every Texan site is now both informative and engaging. As a result, the team is able to more effectively promote the new brand and provide a more accurate representation of the organization’s widespread impact. Staff members can now easily update the site as needed and track performance with Google Analytics. Overall, the restructured content has made it easier than ever for users to find the information they need. The fresh look has increased engagement from both donors and advocates, and more people can now learn and get involved.
