How our new website empowers connected communities

Our new website emphasizes our “partners over vendors” approach—to better connect and serve your community.

Partners not vendors

Community centers are too often treated as second class citizens by tech companies. But we believe they deserve support and recognition for all the amazing good they do.

We partnered with the experienced team at One Net to lead us through a vision and design process. Through in-depth interviews with community center partners and internal team members, we honed in on what makes us tick as an organization. The narrative that we are partners and not vendors became the common thread woven throughout our new site.

We understand what it is like to be a mission driven organization, because we are one. Many of our staff worked previously in community centers. We show up for non-profit organizations, and we stay by their side, because we believe that technology for nonprofits should be as good as for-profit companies.

Our partnership with Traction Rec has helped us delight our staff and members.
Jamie Bruning-Miles, President | CEO, San Francisco YMCA

The organizations we work with are people focused, and so are we. The tone and language we use across the site is friendly, empathetic, and conversational, so people feel comfortable as they explore our products and services.

Make visitors feel seen

We recognize the diversity of visitors that may interact with our website—all with different challenges and goals. They may be a YMCA CFO, a JCC Programs Manager, or a BGCA Marketing Manager.

Previously, we organized the pages on our site only in terms of general “features” and organizations we served.

In our new site, we reinvented our information architecture with a focus on clear user journeys for each persona. We added pages for different roles like Leadership, Operations, and Members, as well as team-specific pages like Child Care and Camps, Programs, and Finance and Accounting.

This allows site visitors to more easily find what they are looking for in the people-centric design. At the same time, it creates a sense of connection as they are able to explore features of our technology that are relevant to them—making them feel seen.

Every community is unique and yet some of them have similar missions. YMCAs, JCCs, and BGCAs can see their sibling organizations reflected back at them on dedicated pages and through a filter function on our zhuzhed-up Success Stories page.

Visualize warmth and inclusion

Communities are warm, welcoming and vibrant. With our visual strategy, we wanted to reflect that.

In order to celebrate communities, we used a mixture of emotional real-life photography, videography, and accents of hand-drawn iconography to appear approachable and relatable—while still being distinct from our audiences' brands.

Communities are colorful. We added secondary colors to our existing palette to bring a sense of balance and warmth, including a peach (“Orangesicle”) and a lavender ("Daydream"). Lots of fun shapes in our design make it feel heartfelt and lively.

While our focus is on community, we also build technology. To build an initial familiarity with our product, we inserted simplified pieces of UI from our CRM to help clearly communicate different functions within the solution.

Cultivating connection on the screen and in the world

At the end of the day, we believe communities are about building relationships. 

We created a written narrative of partnership, warm and inclusive visuals, and a people-centric focus throughout our new site. With emotional impact, we hope it will forge lasting relationships with visitors. 

Communities inherently connect people. It’s what we do and it’s what our solutions do. As a digital representation of both us and our solution, we hope our new website will be the starting point for more connected communities out in the world.

Gratitude and growth

The website redesign process has certainly been a fun journey. We’re so grateful to all of the community center partners that continue to inspire us, and all of our internal community members who helped us bring it to life. 

We invite you to tell us what you think. Because just like our communities, we are constantly evolving, and we believe that better technology leads to bigger impact.