Alliance for the Great Lakes

The Alliance for the Great Lakes is a Chicago-based conservation group dedicated to preserving the source of drinking water for 40+ million people. Here’s how Mightybytes has helped them better meet fundraising and advocacy goals since 2016.

With projects ranging from a full website redesign and ongoing digital marketing support to re-imagining one of their flagship volunteer programs, our work together has been grounded in mutual trust and a deep desire to help the organization meet or exceed its long-term goals.

Mightybytes gave the Alliance’s website a complete redesign in 2016. They were using several clunky systems to manage online communications and donations. Paired with a stale, outdated website, visitors struggled to find the information they needed.

This resulted in lost opportunities for donations, advocacy, and volunteering, which hindered overall communications.

Through a series of collaborative workshops and goal mapping exercises we collectively retooled how the organization told and shared its story to better inspire Great Lakes advocates to take specific actions.

The website redesign process included the following elements:

• A content audit helped us understand what they had to work with and informed content strategy and information architecture efforts.
• Content workshops and tools like Gather Content streamlined the process of culling and migrating content while also retooling the organization’s content creation process.
• Style tiles and a detailed style guide drove the visual design of content/display patterns and individual components as well as the overall site.
• Component prototyping aligned our designs with user needs and business goals.
• Training workshops and a fully-customized CMS back-end helped the Alliance’s team get up to speed quickly and more efficiently manage the new website over time.
• We also set them up with web hosting powered by renewable energy and ongoing maintenance to keep their site updated and secure.

A website launch offers great opportunities to collect valuable user data and make informed decisions about how best to improve your business goals. To that end, we have helped the Alliance track and improve upon core key performance indicators (KPIs) across multiple systems over time:

• Online donation revenue increased more than 50% in the first year after the redesign, and increased almost 30% during the second year.
• Thanks to improved SEO efforts, organic web traffic grew by more than 25% in year two.

Mightybytes also ran a design sprint for Adopt-a-Beach, the Alliance’s flagship program. Custom software running the program was buggy with mobile device compatibility issues. This presented usability issues and lost opportunities for Alliance admins and volunteer leaders alike.

While a redesign was inevitable, there were still many unanswered questions. The Design Sprint format helped everyone answer those questions while also learning new things in a collaborative setting.

The Design Sprint started with a half-day problem-framing workshop, then continued with four days of intensive human-centered design exercises meant to understand, ideate, prototype, and test a potential solution with real users. 

For a detailed breakdown of how we ran the sprint, please read our post How to Run Design Sprints for Social Impact Projects.

Our relationship with the Alliance for the Great Lakes illustrates what two organizations can accomplish when collaboration is grounded in trust and motivated by creating shared value.

In addition to those described above, we have collaborated with the Alliance on a variety of partner engagements from beach cleanups to board service and look forward to continue helping them reach their goals.