The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee is a special organization dedicated to the care and well-being to retired elephants from around the world. They rely heavily on grants and donations to run their operations.
Objective
To create a modernized, responsive website that utilized The Sanctuary’s amazing photography and animals to promote their mission and drive donations and subscriptions.
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Process
Research and Challenges
Research for this project came from discussions with the Sanctuary’s staff and looking through their previous site’s analytics to find pain points. This allowed us to easily review their old site to see what could be improved upon and using that data to influence many of the user flows and other features found on the site.
The project required a lot of patience as many stakeholders were required for reviews and updates. When so many voices come into the fray, conflicting ideas and input need to be managed in a way that allows for the best outcome from all parties. We were able to navigate this well, and the client was very happy with the process and results.
Design and Development
After completing our research and working to update the website’s style guide from the old version, we presented multiple versions of a homepage design in order to find the best “feel” to fit what the client wanted to portray.
From there, we worked meticulously through each page to get approval on all designs before building a responsive front-end of the site. This also allowed the client to review and update any content as we worked through the designs as well.
Results and Impact
Since the site launched, the Elephant Sanctuary has seen an increase in donations and product sales from their online store. Time on the site has also increased due to people diving further into the site to learn more about the Sanctuary and its residents. They’ve also had an uptick in traffic to the site’s most popular page–the Elecam: where users can watch live cameras of the elephants in the habitat.
Launch the SiteClient feedback on the process and final design was overwhelmingly positive, and they’ve been happy with the site’s continued analytics.
