2008 Report Card on the Status of Children in Oregon

Children First for Oregon purchased Adobe CS3 in the spring of 2008 to improve our communication with legislators, business leaders, and other influential decision-makers to help improve the lives of every Oregon child. Children First for Oregon is a trusted, independent child advocacy organization committed to improving the lives of Oregon’s children and families by shaping statewide public policy. We are a small organization with a very limited budget for technology, design, and printing, and without Adobe’s contribution to TechSoup we would not be able to bring the majority of our design work in-house, saving 80% on outside design contractors over the previous year, and making our reports easier to read and access online.

Every year, Children First for Oregon produces an annual report card that serves as the authoritative snapshot of how children and families are doing in our state. The report card had grown stale and difficult to read over the last few years, and we noticed interest in the report beginning to wane because the existing layout translated poorly to the web. We received ongoing complaints from the media, lawmakers, business leaders, and the general public of the difficulty accessing our report online, and our website traffic began to drop-off as a result. Unfortunately, as a small nonprofit we simply did not have the resources to pay an outside designer to redesign our annual report card to make it easier to read and access online.

Fortunately, with the availability of Adobe products on TechSoup, we were able to purchase CS3 and bring the vast majority of our design work in-house. Working off feedback we had received over the past few years, we redesigned our report card using InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator, making the report vastly easier to read, both in print and online, and increasing our web traffic by 50% over the previous year. At the same time, the resulting web traffic driven by the newly redesigned report card allowed us to grow our constituent base by 60% over the previous year, and increasing online donations to our organization by 25%.

The redesigned report card and increased website traffic allowed us to broaden the public’s understanding of the issues facing children in Oregon today, and what we can all do as a state to help improve the lives of our most vulnerable citizens. Specifically, the report card pointed to the fact that more than 100,000 children across our state are without health care coverage, driving the Health grade to an abysmal ‘F’. By highlighting the issue of health care, the report card helped motivate lawmakers and the general public to demand sweeping health reform for Oregon’s children, and right now a bill is making its way through the Oregon Legislature, which we anticipate passing, that would give 95% of every children in our state health insurance.

This kind of change would not have been possible without the resources provided by Adobe, providing our organization with the tools necessary to raise awareness of the issues impacting children.