Moving in the Spirit

It had been over five years since Moving in the Spirit launched its website. During that time, more users were visiting the site on smartphones and tablets. The organization suspected most of these users were parents with children in its programs and wished to offer an improved mobile experience.

As a nonprofit, Moving in the Spirit needed to consider the budget for its redesign. A user-friendly platform would allow the organization to self-manage its digital presence and offer more resources for a thoughtful mobile-first solution.

After a successful partnership on their previous website, Moving in Spirit reached out to SHERPA, which began a discovery and assessment

Kicking off with a collaborative workshop of stakeholders, SHERPA drafted a project and creative brief. Moving in the Spirit focused on the needs of current and prospective parents, students, volunteers, and teachers, specifically:

• Discovering what Moving in the Spirit is

• Understanding who Moving in the Spirit serves

• Learning Moving in the Spirit's inspiring story

• Realizing the impact of Moving in the Spirit's award-winning programs

• Offering parents tools to manage participation in Moving in the Spirit programs

Upon reviewing analytics, SHERPA proposed a navigational sitemap and content strategy to help users find the information and tools documented during the stakeholder collaboration. SHERPA also suggested additional changes to support UX best practices.

Since Moving in the Spirit staff was already familiar with WordPress, SHERPA recommended continuing with the platform and refreshing the site with a new theme. SHERPA's visual design and development teams customized and configured the new site so that Moving in the Spirit could load its content and stay within its budget.

Moving in the Spirit launched its redesigned mobile-optimized site as it held the open house of its new facility. Together, the facility and website offer parents, students, and staff new homes in the real and virtual worlds.

Since that time, mobile use has increased by almost ten percent.

The number of users, new users, sessions, and pageviews has significantly increased. The bounce rate of users immediately leaving the site after landing on a page has decreased by almost 20%.

The UX content strategy contributed to a 21% increase in organic traffic.

"The Moving in the Spirit redesign shows an organization is only limited by its imagination. Collaboration was key to understanding Moving in the Spirit's constraints and needs. SHERPA's experience helped craft a content-and-mobile-first approach that increased user engagement and successfully meet the goals of the project."

- Jef Blocker, UX Analyst