Client Overview

The Conservation Fund is the nation's foremost environmental nonprofit dedicated to protecting America's most important landscapes and waterways for future generations. The Conservation Fund pioneers a balanced, non-advocacy, non-membership approach to conservation, one that blends environmental and economic goals and objectives. Their "Go Zero program" was created to calculate and offset the annual carbon dioxide emitted by a specific activity, business, organization or individual. Therefore, all "carbon credits" are retired and cannot be banked for future offset purposes or sold.

Challenge

The Conservation Fund needed a new content management platform to manage their main organization site, with all its ancillary functions. In addition, the platform needed to be able to manage all six of the Conservation Fund's supporting regional websites and the Intranet. Keeping a tight budget was also a factor so the implementation needed to be implemented in as a precise and efficient manner as possible.

Solution

To satisfy all of Conservation Fund's needs, Phase2 and HZDG worked together develop a great new design presence for the new site, which included an "earthy" color palette incorporating various interactive features and unique navigation methods. Special attention was made to implementing the CMS from a unified perspective, incorporating the needs of all of the regional separate mini-sites into the overall spectrum of website feature offerings.

ConservationFund.org: CMS-Driven Website

Some of the components included in the CMS platform development effort included the following:

• Online donations, which include transaction reporting and integration with the Conservation Fund's existing backend, third-party CRM system,


• Course registrations, for classes that can be scheduled and paid for via the website,


• E-Newsletter subscription and preference management,


• Interactive Flash imagery using photos from the Conservation Fund's own extensive photography collection.

"Go Zero" Calculator

A related component of the overall website platform redesign effort was the development of the "Go Zero" calculator.

This is a new function that calculates an individual's carbon usage based on a number of user-defined variables. This feature was developed from a modular perspective so that the Conservation Fund's large organizational partners could re-use and re-brand the calculator for display on their internal company sites.

For more information about The Conservation Fund, visit their website at www.conservationfund.org.