The Cara Program: Case Study

Founded in 1991, The Cara Program is a Chicago-based non-profit that empowers men and women affected by homelessness and poverty with the skills, confidence and resources to secure and sustain quality jobs and achieve long-term success. Since their founding, they have placed more than 2,500 individuals into full-time, rewarding positions with leading Chicago area companies such as ABM Lakeside, The Hilton Hotels, JP Morgan Chase, Sodexho, and more.

The Cara Program sought a redesign of their static website, one that engaged visitors by quickly delivering key information that was clear and concise, and could be easily maintained by Cara staff. Being a non-profit website, they also needed a way to accept donations, recruit volunteers, allow visitors to join their mailing list, and recruit sponsors and employment partners. In addition to being able to simply accept donations, they wanted to eventually “empower” donors to use social media and/or other outlets to spread the word, champion their cause and help others donate or otherwise support. The ability to share some content also needed to be a feature on The Cara Program "child" program websites: Clean Slate, Quad Communities and Career Pathways.

Duo Consulting was chosen to implement their goals and Drupal was the platform chosen. Why Drupal?

Drupal was the platform of choice because it provided the features and functionality the Cara Program desired, and integrated with CiviCRM, a free, open source CRM and their current source of event management.
Design and Architecture Direction

When we approached the new architecture for The Cara Program, we knew there would be some challenges. On the old site, it took a lot of reading and scrolling before you could understand a program’s purpose, and what it did for the students. We needed to tell the story of The Cara Program concisely, so that new users could orient themselves to the program and partner programs without having to wade through 2+ pages of content. We also needed to allow users to take a deep dive into detailed information when it was relevant to their search.

The solution we came up with involved simplifying the main navigation into 3 main buckets: a discovery bucket for users looking to find out what The Cara Program is and what it does (What We Do); a metric bucket for users wanting to know the effectiveness and reach of the program through statistics and explanations (The Impact), and finally, a call to action bucket for users looking to get involved (What You Can Do).

Within each bucket, we wanted to provide two tracks for accessing information. The first track was the fast track for users skimming the website. This included short one-to-two sentence overviews, without page refreshing. The second track was integrated into the first track, so when a user found the category relevant to their research, they were given an option to read more about that topic and dive deep into the content. This content strategy allowed users who skim information to skim more effectively, and those doing in-depth research to easily access full pages of information.

We attended motivations, met volunteers, and toured classrooms. One theme from all of our experiences is that The Cara Program was all about movement: movement to get your attention, movement to take your life in a new positive direction, movement to make a difference today.

We were inspired to make sure the site design captured the energy and movement of everyone involved. We went to work on UI patterns like the infinite image scroller on the homepage, attracting the user with vibrant imagery. Video and events weren't buried on an internal page; they expanded to a full frame on the homepage. We also placed the private and commercial donors into a ticket stream on the bottom of each page, to show how their contributions help keep the program running. source: http://drupal.org/node/868698 semoga Informasi ini bermanfaat
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