Wide Horizons For Children is an international child welfare nonprofit working with some of the world’s most vulnerable children. They help prevent children from becoming orphans by keeping families together, and for kids who are already orphaned or abandoned, they support high quality orphanages and help find adoptive families in the US.
We began working with WHFC — performing quick website content updates to their then Joomla sponsorship site. Our relationship has grown into full marketing collaboration, working with Wide Horizons as an extension of their in-house marketing team on an array of projects including but not limited to: email campaigns, golf tournaments, branding, sponsorship and adoption collateral, and eventually a complete redesign and development of their website.
Feeling as though previous vendors weren’t hitting the mark, WHFC struggled with their website messaging and functionality. BMD&M collaborated closely with their marketing team to not only make sure their site looked great, but also accomplished their goals while keeping necessary current working features intact and limiting disruptions in existing functionality such as:
WHFC’s previous ecommerce software was limiting. We migrated their existing shopping cart to WooCommerce and extended out-of-the-box features to create fully customized payment solutions which function separately for child sponsorships, their gift catalogue and adoption payments. We customized emails, subscriptions and collaborated with their Salesforce team to integrate user activity with their new CRM platform.
Designing and updating a site using a page builders and templates can be limiting and frustrating. Our methods of developing custom Gutenberg blocks and fields give us total control of the site’s design. We can build the back end of WordPress to suit the needs of the site content not the other way around. That’s what we did for WHFC and now their staff can update any part of the site without having to input any code, brand colors, spacing or text formatting — and it still looks great on the front end.
WHFC found Fundraise UP as the perfect solution to raise money for seasonal campaigns and emergency aid appeals. We integrated this third party platform into their site by creating post types and custom fields to make it easy for their team to embed corresponding Fundraise Up campaigns. Users can browse all active campaigns directly on the site for a positive and trustworthy user experience.
Throughout the design and development process, we continue to offer our strategic marketing and content experience to organize site content, pages and functionality. As BMD&M can look from an outside point of view while working as an extension of WHFC’s marketing team, we are able to align WHFC’s messaing goals with the customer’s point of view and guide the user down the buyers journey through lead generation.
We really didn’t know much about WHFC oustide of adoption during our earlier years of working with them as their supporting services were tucked away in their old site(s). Through our in-depth discovery phase and collaborative approach we learned so much about the great things they do and we are able to help them bring these services to the forefront in a clear and concise manner.
With custom design and development, we don’t have to “hope” that content will format properly. We have full control over responsive design and development.
“Beth is the best type of marketing partner for a small organization like ours: a completely safe pair of hands. No matter what we throw at her, she delivers — always quality work, always on time, always on budget. She’s both a great listener, and questions our briefs — turns out, what we think we want isn’t always what we actually need! She does deep desk research to find the best web plugins or tech platforms for us, and gives us sound, practical advice on all things graphic and web design, web dev and SEO. Beth is wonderfully collaborative — and a lot of fun to work with. We value her very highly. From Sarah Blick, Director of Marketing Communications