Funders Together Website Redesign

The new web site for Funders Together to End Homelessness launched today. Funders Together, a national network of foundations and corporations supporting strategic and effective grant making to end homelessness, approached us to design and build the new site to help reinforce their positioning as a center for thought leadership on the subject of homelessness in the United States.

They had several key challenges and opportunities:

• Complex subject matter: homelessness has multi-faceted causes and solutions
• Abundant content: one of the main purposes of the site is to disseminate a huge amount of information on best practices, news and case studies
• Diverse audience: the site needs to serve Funders Together members, non-member funders, prospective funders, housing and service providers, public sector agencies, the media, and the general public. Each group has its own set of functional and informational needs. In addition, viewers can be anywhere on a spectrum from highly informed about the causes of and solutions for homelessness to almost complete ignorance.
• Communications with and among members and partners: Network organizations such as this have to meet the needs of different component organizations. There was an additional need to facilitate cooperation among the constituent groups.

Beehive's approach was to use web and rich media techniques to increase the immediacy of the issues faced by the homeless. At the same time, we provided an easy-to-understand conceptual framework for homelessness and a hierarchy of information that allows users to efficiently access the information at the right level for them.

The Issues Explorer introduces this framework, and provides opportunities for users to drill down into the content.

The site also includes a robust search engine and provides information on an interactive map, providing a critical aspect to this audience: location-based content. Since homelessness is a regional issue, location is key to solution identification and implementation.

The Content Explorer offers filtered keyword search, with results displayed as text and on the Google Maps map.

The Partner Locator shows foundations, housing and service providers, public sector partners, and housing projects on a map.

We have incorporated social media into the site, with ShareThis functionality throughout , Funders Together's Twitter feed available on the blog, news and events pages, and with links to FT's Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube pages. We even incorporated a “Tweet This” feature into the Content Management System running the site, which we built on open source technologies (Zend Framework and Doctrine ORM.) The site's design, which is clean and accessible, reinforces the streamlined access to information.