Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights
The ICIRR home page.
One of ICIRR's many affiliate organizations and programs.
ICIRR's About Us page highlights a video that describes the organization's mission and programs.
Illinois’ best resource for promoting the rights of immigrants and refugees streamlines communication with constituents via a new website.
The Illinois Coalition for Immigrants and Refugee Rights (ICIRR) educates and organizes statewide immigrant and refugee communities on their rights and informs member organizations, news media, and the general public about immigrant and refugee contributions. With thousands of pages of content on their existing site, users had little success finding the information necessary to make informed decisions on policy, research, and many programs the coalition offers. ICIRR turned asked Mightybytes to help them streamline content and improve user experience overall via a website redesign.
OUR APPROACH
The primary business goals for the new ICIRR website were:
- Drive enrollment into the organization’s online community
- Drive membership participation and retention
- Improve the online experience for users and admins
- Improve online presence rating through enhanced SEO efforts
To meet these goals we kicked the project off with several work sessions to flesh out details of content strategy, information architecture, and user experience. These workshops included up to fifteen members from different ICIRR initiatives and occurred over the course of several weeks. The results from these sessions were:
- Streamlined site architecture which provides users with an intuitive path to enroll and get assistance
- Content and social media strategy recommendations
- Keyword analysis and SEO guidelines
- Wireframes of key site pages
IMPLEMENTATION
In order to meet business goals, the ICIRR site underwent a complete overhaul from design to code. On the front end, a new interface made content much easier to find and navigate. On the back end, the old content management system was replaced in its entirety by the more flexible, scalable Drupal 6. An improved admin interface enhances the ability of ICIRR staff to spread the organization’s mission and provide resources to their user groups.
THE RETURN
The new site allows ICIRR to easily and effectively explain the organization’s programs and benefits. The new design highlights ICIRR’s mission through news, videos, blog posts and resources, and provides a strong call to action for ICIRR’s audiences to get involved and get assistance.