Case Study: The Wilderness Society Website

How do you build a line of defense for public lands?

The Challenge

Our work with The Wilderness Society provided the opportunity to bring U.S. public lands into the spotlight while supporting national and local advocacy efforts, grassroots organizing and litigation through a website redesign. When we began our partnership in 2017, Wilderness was shifting to a more aggressive strategy to address the Trump administration’s public lands and climate policies. Yet they had to be mindful that their base covered a wide swath of political views. We helped to guide a bipartisan approach to their messaging, while leveraging the political climate by also supporting their fundraising efforts.

Markets & Services

Launch a new brand, earn a Webby nod

With a new brand that needed to be rolled out, we had the opportunity to extend their vision into the digital realm through the redesign of their flagship site, wilderness.org. Leaning into their incredible library of original photography, we designed and built a site that reflected the expansive, iconic public lands they work to defend. Our designs are radically clean to let the immersive photography shine through, spotlighting the precious wildlands and wildlife at stake. The resulting site was a Webby People’s Voice nominee in 2019 and a Webby Nominee in 2020 for Best Charitable Organization/Non-Profit website.

Cull dusty content

Results from our content audit and keyword research informed recommendations on what needed to be updated, created from scratch or archived. Through the analytics, we identified 1,600 pages that weren’t getting any eyes, or were duplicating existing content—thus hurting SEO. Sunsetting those pages helped to massively declutter the new site and create a streamlined user experience.

Build awareness around important issues

Bringing awareness to key issues affecting public lands was at the heart of Wilderness’ new strategy. Their goal was to not only inspire their donor base to help protect public lands, but also to ensure that people in local communities understood the lasting effects proposed legislation might have on their daily lives. As such, we created a section of the website called Wild Places where visitors can explore areas where The Wilderness Society is working, and learn how to join the cause.

Beat fundraising efforts

New FastAction forms and an EveryAction donation page have turned the site into an engine for fundraising – exceeding goals by 200%. Our marketing team is continually testing different donation form configurations and designs to maximize conversions. We also created a set of tools to provide flexibility during peak fundraising opportunities, such as Wilderness’ annual spring membership drive and the busy end-of-year season. New lightboxes, components and revamped “Ways to Give” content are all working in sync with our fundraising efforts to drive record donations for our client.

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Support authors and accessibility

We leveraged the Drupal CMS to build a taxonomy-driven site that dynamically pulls in relevant content at the state and issue levels. Our process also ensured that metadata for image captions and sources were in place for accessibility and copyrights. The CMS is much easier to use than the previous one, creating flexibility for content authors through an expanded library of components that serve many functions, issues and layouts.

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