One in 100 children worldwide is born with a heart defect, but only one in 10 has access to care. Children’s HeartLink, a Minnesota-based nonprofit, trains medical teams to perform lifesaving heart surgery in underserved parts of the world. In 2016, CHL trained over 1,700 medical professionals who went on to care for more than 74,000 children.
Awareness and engagement are critical to CHL’s success. As a nonprofit, the organization relies on donors, partnerships, and medical volunteers to support their work. But an outdated and content-heavy marketing website made it difficult to tell their story and convey impact, so they turned to Software for Good for help building a completely new marketing website.
Our first order of business? Significantly streamline the new site’s content and structure. As part of the strategy process, we developed personas representing both actual and aspirational users to help guide decision-making throughout the redesign. Our team worked closely with Children’s HeartLink to evaluate and prioritize web content—ultimately recommending a much simpler structure that emphasizes storytelling and impact.
CHL’s existing design partner provided creative direction, including home page design and a system of visual elements for us to extend across the site. Images of children who have been helped by CHL are prominently featured alongside clean, bright blocks of color and text.
Because content management had been an ongoing challenge for CHL’s busy communications team, we recommended building the new site in WordPress—making updates to content and imagery simple and intuitive. In addition to building out the site’s design and functionality, our development team integrated with and built custom forms in eTapestry to enable online giving and gala sponsorship and ticket purchases.
The new Children’s HeartLink website invites users to be part of the CHL story, and offers them a clear path to give, volunteer, or otherwise get involved in saving children’s lives.