- Organization Name:
- Fossil Rim Wildlife Center
- Describe your creative piece – what is it and what has it been used for, and why is it innovative?
- We are a non profit organization that does not receive funding from the state or federal government so we have to be innovative in our thinking to help raise money to support our organization. We use our website to help us in this matter. Our creative piece is our website. We have used it to help promote Fossil Rim Wildlife Center by educating people about who we are, what we do here and to sell products, memberships and hold fundraisers in our new online store. Our website is innovative for facilities like ours. We use it to educate people about the animals we have here and to communicate that we are saving animals, some of whom no longer exist in the wild. This website allows us to reach more people than we can through print or radio ads.
- What issue or problem were you working to address with this piece?
- Our biggest problem was we had pricing contradictions on our old site that led to a lot of confusion for our customers. Our website had 3 different versions of graphic layouts still being used which led to a non-cohesive look and feel. People couldn’t tell if they were still on the same site or not. We also needed to communicate our mission of education and conservation more effectively. We wanted a site that would visually fit within the style of Fossil Rim Wildlife Center. We had on online store that contained only five items, and we could only update the store by manually changing the pages. So the store had not sold anything in a long time. Like most small non-profits, manpower is a issue, too much to do and too few to accomplish it.
- How has your submission successfully impacted your organization’s ability to solve this issue/problem?
- Our redesigned site meets all of the objectives we set out to address. It has a cohesive look and our main banner image of the hills here are immediately recognizable to anyone who has visited us. We have an online store with over 40 products and more to be added. We are also selling memberships online. We have one price list with all pricing listed there, all pages link back to that 1 pricing page so we no longer have conflicting prices. Education is a major part of our mission, and with the web site we can not only educate our guest about animal conservation, but we can also educate them that by supporting us they are also supporting the survival of endanger species. Adobe CS4 has helped to make this all possible for us, we were able to redesign the site in less then four months with just two fulltime employees and one part time contractor. Our website is now easier to navigate, clearer to understand and is a more viable option for communicating to the world what we do here.
