Inspiring Advocacy and Action

What We Did

The Alzheimer’s Impact Movement (AIM) wanted a website experience that better represented their work and influence. The new website needed to help visitors understand state and federal policy priorities and help them learn about legislative initiatives supported by AIM. It was also important that users didn’t stop at reading — the website needed to give users clear paths to take action and advocate for Alzheimer’s, whether by contacting their local policymakers, volunteering or joining AIM. Mediacurrent partnered with AIM to redesign their site and move it to a new CMS.

Identifying Opportunities and Goals

To inform the decisions in our redesign, we began by conducting a site-wide audit and gathered insights from staff and advocate interviews, traffic data, surveys and staff questionnaires.

These insights formed a strategic foundation to help us establish our goals for the redesign and the direction for the new site’s structure and features.

Creating Clear Paths to Advocacy

One of AIM’s major goals was to encourage people to advocate for the organization and its work. To accomplish this, we provided opportunities throughout the site for site visitors to take action. We wanted to avoid the ambiguous callouts to ‘Get Involved’ that often leave users assuming a high time or financial commitment. Advocating for a cause can look different for everyone. We put easy action steps on the homepage to show users with only a few minutes to spare how they can quickly do something to support AIM’s work. Beyond the homepage, clear calls to action to direct visitors into their next steps. We focused especially on the volunteer sign-up process, making it prominent across the site, easy to access and simple to complete.

 

Increasing Access to Information

Information is the first step to building an audience of advocates. We designed the site to make it easier for users to learn about federal and state policies supported by AIM. And we wanted to make AIM’s cause even more personal for site visitors by helping them discover state-level data and advocacy efforts. We created an interactive map that helps users learn about the current Alzheimer’s situation in their state, as well as their state’s Alzheimer’s plan and policy priorities and opportunities to get involved at a local level.

During our design process, we knew this interactive state map would add a lot of value to the user experience, but it required a custom solution to bring it to life. Most SVG maps that separate each state don’t count Washington, D.C., but for this use case, users needed to be able to click on the District and see its data. Users also needed to easily click on other small entities like Rhode Island and Delaware. Our team designed and built a custom clickable map that made these smaller areas more obvious and accessible.

Solving Challenges for Congressional Connections

The redesigned website includes a search that allows users to search for any member of Congress and learn about AIM priority legislation they’ve sponsored. AIM had a congressional API that could pull in the needed data, but actually getting the information onto the site in a format that was easy for users to navigate required some technical problem-solving. Our team built a custom search and filter experience using AIM’s API, then configured the front-end so users could easily filter the list of members of Congress and click into pages for each individual.

Another key feature of the new site that directly played into one of AIM’s main goals was the ability to contact members of Congress through the site. This feature was powered by a third-party integration with limited customizability. Faced with these constraints, our team still saw value in making the experience cohesive with the rest of the site. Working with the third-party vendor, we were able to build an experience that matched the rest of the site by writing custom code, sending it to the vendor to implement and refining until the feature fit the rest of the design system.