Camp Kesem is a nationally recognized non-profit organization dedicated to supporting children impacted by a parent's cancer at no cost to families. Since 2001, their team of student leaders has supported communities nationwide, and in 2018 they served nearly 9,000 children. Their website serves as the main hub for camp information, as well as the platform for donations and camper registration.
Due to poor site performance, the marketing team at Camp Kesem was driven to migrate their site from their previous management platform, Wordpress, to a more efficient platform called Webflow, increasing load speeds and reducing clutter. Webflow is also a more intuitive platform, making it easier for the Kesem team to make day-to-day site updates going forward.
After working with the marketing team at Camp Kesem for several months on their initial Wordpress system, it became apparent to both us and the Kesem team that the Wordpress back-end interface was not only burdened with poor loading times for site pages, but also difficult to manage. In fact, the reason Kesem contacted us in the first place was to help manage the site, as it was too difficult for members of their team to add new content on their own.
As a result, we proposed a complete platform migration to Webflow, which offered complete design flexibility, vast speed improvements, and a collaborative content management system (CMS) that we could train Kesem’s team to use, making it possible for them to handle website updates in-house rather than hiring third-party developers.
Since the site's relaunch, the team at Kesem has been trained to utilize Webflow's CMS and now uses it to make frequent updates to site content. When asked about the new CMS, Kesem's Operations Coordinator is quoted as saying "This is the best thing that's ever happened to me." No joke -- he actually said that.
Before starting each project, our team performs a full audit of the client’s website, pinpointing current pain points. During our audit of Camp Kesem’s site, we uncovered quite a few readability issues with site content, primarily on mobile devices. Our “up close and personal” approach allowed us to identify and fix a host of accessibility problems found throughout the rebuild of the site, vastly improving the performance and usability of campkesem.org.
Since the relaunch of campkesem.org in July of 2019, the site has seen an improvement in bounce-rate (up to 20% from the previous month), while page views have increased by 12%.
The migration also decreased site load time by an impressive 93%. Prior to launch, the load time for the home page alone was approximately 7 seconds, with some pages taking as long as 15 seconds to load. Because of the migration and optimization, the home page now only takes 1 second to load. Other site pages have seen the same boost in speed, with the heaviest pages loading in less than 5 seconds.
These metrics showcase how crucial this website migration was to improving overall User Experience on Camp Kesem’s site.
Giving Tuesday is a global generosity movement unleashing the power of people and organizations to transform their communities. Camp Kesem has participated in the movement since 2014 and proposed a project to Wendigo for their 2019 campaign, whose role was to develop an engaging online experience for site visitors. We worked closely with the design team at Kesem to craft a user-friendly, compelling, and educational landing page specifically for the Giving Tuesday fundraiser.
Part of our responsibility as the front-end team was to bring Kesem's vision of an interactive experience into digital reality. While essential information took precedence, there were quite a few "nice-to-haves" we wished to deliver as well, one of which was a custom animated fundraising thermometer that pulled fundraising data automatically from Kesem's donation platform, Classy.
The donation feed was connected to Zapier using the Classy API, and the data fed into Webflow's CMS through a 'zap'. The result was a bespoke solution relying entirely on back-end infrastructure developed by Wendigo. Additionally, we created an "activity map" displaying fundraisers around the US in much the same way, this time leveraging the use of Google Maps API, and feeding the activities into the CMS through a spreadsheet.
Camp Kesem raised $1.8M in online donations in 2018, and the 2019 campaign was an improvement on that, surpassing their online donation goal of $2M by 20%. This large amount of donations cannot be attributed to Wendigo alone, the staff, student leaders and volunteers at Camp Kesem all fueled this peer-to-peer fundraising effort along with a large social media push. That being said, our team at Wendigo played an integral role in the campaign's success. The site saw an influx of new users, over 20% from the previous year as well as an improvement in bounce rate of over 5%.
Our team at Wendigo took initiative on a problem worth solving and crafted a unique solution that got results. Our ongoing engagement with Kesem afforded us a better understanding of the overall mission of the project. Our team worked nights, weekends, and remained consistently available prior to, during, and after the campaign. Measuring success is easy to do when considering dollar amounts raised or site data metrics, but the true success of this relationship can be attributed to the hard work of our team, our motivation during difficult times, and the impact to the lives of the children served by Kesem. It is ultimately those successes that have made working with this organization a rewarding and life changing experience.
Camp Kesem
Richard Segal
Domonique Hollins
Wendigo
GCC's needs were growing beyond the capabilities of its old website, and the primary goal of the website redesign was to move to a platform that enabled adding new content regularly. Another top priority was to improve the messaging and information architecture of the website. Doing so effectively drives users to donate and sign up for training programs.
With the full redesign of The Sullivan Law Firm’s website, the goal was to increase site visibility by optimizing SEO friendliness, better educate potential clients by revamping site structure and content, and, ultimately, help the firm book consultations and sign up new cases.
