WildEarth Guardians
A modern platform to advocate for the voiceless
WildEarth Guardians, a non-profit with fiercely loyal supporters, has the goal of “Safeguarding the Wild in the American West”. They are a lean and efficient group, moving quickly to act every single day for voiceless wild creatures and places in the West.
WildEarth Guardians needed a modern and easy-to-use platform for their website, which had grown to thousands of pages and had satellite blogs, pages and documents that were hard to find. We set out to redesign and implement a streamlined and organized experience for their users, using a phased approach to getting the most important and action-inspiring portions of the site out there quickly.
This ongoing partnership started with a standalone blog, an action center to showcase their work and inspire donations immediately, plus micro-sites to showcase their work in special programs for wildlife and rivers work.
The new main website now incorporates all of these into one WordPress site in a way that benefits SEO and the user experience.
User Experience
Web Design
WordPress Development
Blackbaud/Luminate design + integration
“The team at Merge Studio was responsive, attentive to detail, and genuinely cared about our success.”
Alex Herrera
Web Design + WordPress Development
In the course of designing and developing their new site in WordPress, we have tackled the challenge of creating calls to action that integrate with their CRM and fundraising platform, Blackbaud’s Luminate. We also must keep in mind the redesigned website will be updated by many program directors, staff and volunteers in multiple locations in western States. This forms our approach to creating a flexible, yet consistent, back end and front end user experience. The site also integrates many social networking platforms for viewing and sharing WildEarth Guardians’ work in multiple ways.
Blackbaud
Working with a 3rd-party Blackbaud developer, we designed and implemented a new look and feel for email subscribe, donation, and action forms that interacted with their CRM platform, including responsive and multi-step forms, so they would be consistent with the new website design and experience.
Very early testing results show that online revenue is up by 7%, online individual gift amount is up 20%, and monthly gifts are up by 18%. We expect these positive results to grow as the full website is moved over to WordPress and the user experience is consistent across all online interactions.
View Donate Forms View E-News Sign Up Form View an Action Alert
Lead Generation
We designed creative new ways to get their users’ attention and generate new leads and donation opportunities, including visually engaging modals and calls to action, providing new sources of engagement for their users.
Emails
The email campaign designs and templates we created and helped to implement on their CRM platform, Blackbaud’s Luminate, have increased user engagement, actions and donations in early testing and results. The earliest results show email open rates are up by over 5%, action rates increase by over 75%, and unsubscribe rates are down by over 16%.
Merge is a tremendously powerful, yet nimble design agency that not only has the know-how to create a beautiful website but they take ownership to solve the inevitable challenges on the way. Merge is helping us navigate some tough waters towards integrating our CMS and CRM for a 3,000+ page responsive website redesign.
Dave Levine
Communications Director