Julia J. Maloof

description

I was hired by the YMCA Lebanon to work with a design company to create a new website for them that would better showcase their work and help them to attract volunteers and donors.

The project had been stalled for almost 3 years, I had it up and running in 8 months.

Problem Statement

The work that the YMCA’s various departments are doing is not being showcased online to donors and potential clients. This has an effect on the number of donations and type of work that the YMCA is able to do.

User Research and Client relations

The first thing I did was schedule meetings with each department of the YMCA to understand what they were working on and what they needed out of the website. There were seven departments.

• Medical Program

• Youth Program

• Aflatoun Prgram

• Agriculture & Environment

• Economic Empowerment

• YMCA Building Bridges

• Atayeb el Rif Program

These seven programs and departments functioned as the main departments for the organization.

Basic user interactions

After speaking with the program heads, I determined that the functionalities that they needed were:

• Overview/Front page

• Interior Menu

• News

• Success Stories

We then continued to personalize those pages depending on the program. Some examples of personalized features:

• Al Tayeb Al Rif is a program selling goods created by impoverished women. We put a sale segment in where people could look over all of the products online and call to order them.

• The Medical program needed a map that displayed where every dispensary in the country was, so that someone could go online and find the medical dispensary nearest to them

Specialized User Interaction Features

The YMCA and their programs were also posting “news updates” on Facebook, with information on new projects and events they were completing. I decided from a user interaction perspective, it was an engaging way to get people to dive into the website.

So we built in “News” sections in each program page, so that people would be drawn into their pages and they could also update the site with the things they were working on.

We built in a front page that automatically posted the latest news article, so that whenever something was added it would be displayed on the first page, as well as built in controls to change the photos, text, which stories were displayed first, etc.

Building Out the Site

I then picked out the photos for each program page, wrote out the content, and worked with the design company as the project manager, reviewing and revising their designs. We picked out icons for each of the programs, and I designed the layouts and text of each page. I worked with them on what fonts, spacing, and cropping we needed for it to be a cohesive and attractive site.

Project Conclusion

The project had been stalled for almost three years - I completed it within 10 months.

We gave the YMCA the ability to

• Update the public on their latest “News” and project accomplishments easily

• Let the public know about their different programs and what they do

• Attract donors and make it easier for donors to contribute through the site

• Apply for jobs and volunteer positions through the site

• Sell goods and promote upcoming events

To finish off the project, I presented it to the shareholders to get their feedback and comments. While this is a complete, uploaded site, there are ongoing discussions of new features, such as a donor page.

Website link: http://www.ymca-leb.org.lb/