Project Background
The St. Kizito Foundation is a Northeast Ohio-based 501c(3) scholarship foundation that provides educational opportunities for students in Uganda. The organization awards scholarships to primary and secondary education scholars to cover tuition, room, and board. Dylan began partnering with the organization in 2019 on its Marketing Committee. In 2021, Dylan joined St. Kizito’s Board of Directors. During his time working with St. Kizito, the organization’s website has always been a point of focus. At the time, the Foundation’s website was outdated and not representative of the nonprofit’s mission, work, and impact.
In Dylan’s final semester at Cleveland State University, he needed to complete a capstone project with a fellow group of information systems students—Austin, Chris, and Will. The project needed to benefit a local business. Leveraging Dylan’s connection with the St. Kizito Foundation, the group decided to design and build a new website for the organization as their capstone project.
Our Approach
St. Kizito needed a new website strategy from the ground up to follow best practices for design, information architecture, mobile responsiveness, and SEO. The new website had to help modernize the Foundation’s operations and include the ability to post blogs, promote events, and, most importantly, accept donations. The new website would be a significant lead forward for the Foundation.
Work for the new website began before the capstone project. Dylan refreshed the Foundation’s identity guidelines with an updated color palette and wordmark. When Austin, Chris, Dylan, and Will began to collaborate, the group focused on defining design and functionality requirements for the site, strategizing the site’s information architecture, and performing UX research. This process naturally flowed into the design and build of the site.
Our Work
The new St. Kizito website better represents the Foundation’s work and reputation to online visitors. The site includes multiple core pages that cover the Foundation’s history, work in Uganda, and ways to support it. Users follow a deliberate journey as they visit pages, including a call-to-action section at the bottom of each page to donate, attend events, or subscribe to the Foundation’s newsletter.
The website is 100% responsive across desktop, tablet, and mobile devices and meets performance requirements set forth by Google, which enables the Foundation to participate in the Google Ads for Nonprofits program. St. Kizito’s new website includes custom functionality to add and promote events. It also integrates natively with the Foundation’s new donor management platform, Givebutter, when supporters donate to the organization.
Our Design
Our Impact
The St. Kizito Foundation’s new website has ushered in a new era of digital engagement with the organization’s community. The Foundation hopes to grow its audience to include younger supporters, and the website serves as the primary method to accomplish this goal. Since launching the website, St. Kizito has partnered with the Cleveland International Film Festival and seen an increase in philanthropy through the site, boosting its fundraising efforts.
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