Throughout the process, we likened the experience to building a new house. We concentrated our efforts from the ground up, working to first lay the right foundation (our sitemap), then determining the right number, type and location of rooms (the navigational sections and content), and finally choosing a fresh aesthetic (website graphics) to welcome visitors and make them feel at home.

The process to build our new website taught us a great deal about ourselves and about how to push forward a communications tactic from concept to final product. Among the many lessons learned in the process, we wanted to share two with you.

1. The benefits of collaborating with our website vendors.
Of course, there are many ways to structure vendor/client relationships, all depending on the goals of a particular project. Because we wanted to take an iterative approach to the design and development of our new website, we sought a collaborative partnership with our vendors. This type of working relationship enabled them to bring their expertise forward for strategic decisions, for example in how we structured all of the content we wanted to fit on our portfolio pages. Their input also helped push our website to new heights and challenged us to think creatively about how to feature content in ways that we hadn't previously considered. 2. The importance of telling more stories about ourselves and our portfolio.
Like many organizations in the philanthropic space, we believe that data collection is crucial to our efforts. Building a solid evidence base that verifies the impact of our portfolio is central to our work, and yet we often find that stories of individual lives changed by an organization enrich our understanding of the data we collect.

Our new website doesn't seek to downplay the importance of data, but rather seeks to complement hard numbers with more human interest stories. To this end, we've created a new multimedia section with photo essays, videos, and interviews that tell more about the people we encounter each day.

We've also increased the information provided about our portfolio, and have included a narrative about each organization that highlights an individual they've helped. Finally, our new Team pages articulate more about why we're doing this work.

Moving forward we'll continue exploring ways to share data and stories to strengthen each of these lenses and better bring to life the traction we're seeing through our work.

What we've built so far is only the beginning of what we hope to achieve through our new website. We look forward to using this new platform to further our mission of helping innovative social entrepreneurs and their organizations dramatically improve opportunities for children, families, and communities. We look forward to your feedback!