A simplified user experience helps share the story and support the mission of the Community Foundation of the Ozarks.
Giving is serious business.
The Community Foundation of the Ozarks began in 1973, with an initial donation of $1,500 made by several community banks. 46 years later, the CFO invests and manages nearly $300 million in charitable assets, and has returned more than $400 million in grants and distributions since its founding.
An organization with a reach that broad needs a website that can serve a wide range of audiences at once, including: existing donors, nonprofit partners, community affiliates, interested donors, and grant seekers.
As longtime partners with the CFO—our work includes the Cause Momentum fundraising platform and Give Ozarks community initiative—we gladly accepted this challenge and got to work reimagining the CFO’s website from the ground up.
By making services more accessible and clearly communicating the CFO’s important mission throughout the site, our custom design supports both those who give and those who benefit.
We didn’t take our ongoing relationship for granted when beginning this new website project. Instead we asked questions, listened, and asked more questions to make sure we were getting it right.
Simplifying Navigation
We thought through how navigation could better serve all users, helping them quickly find the information they need. We simplified and streamlined an existing variety of sub-pages into a simple top navigation with at-a-glance accessibility.
The CFO’s audience varies widely from nonprofit partners looking for resources, to students seeking scholarships, to first-time visitors who want to learn more. We wanted to make sure that no matter why someone visits the site—for the first time or the hundredth time—they can find what they’re looking for and easily take action.
Supporting Affiliates
In addition to their work in Springfield, the CFO supports 49 affiliate foundations in communities across central and southern Missouri. The website upgrade included customizable pages for each of these affiliates, providing a great baseline digital presence regardless of their support staff size.
Managing Directories
This site was one of the biggest we’ve tackled, in terms of variety and volume of directories, including:
- Resource library: Gives at-a-glance ease to all of the CFO's annual reports, blog articles, files, and forms
- Grants & scholarships: Helps students and nonprofits to browse and find more information
- Nonprofit partners: Browsable list of over 600 nonprofits partnering with the CFO
- Interactive affiliate map: Showcases of all 49 of the CFO’s community affiliates and leads to new landing pages
- Professional advisors: All 125+ financial advisors who work with donors to give through the CFO, filterable by city
These categories accounted for 2,500 content items. We streamlined the process, creating tools to make it easy for the CFO team to migrate content from their old site, and avoid manually populating this large volume of information.
Bringing It All To Life
For the CFO, storytelling can be a valuable tool to gather support, so we made sure to build in ways to share their impact throughout the site. From small content features to a more robust blog, we created opportunities for the CFO story to come to life.
"This has been one of the smoothest and most pleasant new web sites I’ve been involved in. I think the “MS Difference” may be the time and energy you spent to really try to understand our organization, even knowing us as well as you do, to create a more intuitive user experience."
Press
Read press about the CFO website launch:
Began Our Partnership
$3.6 Million Raised via Cause Momentum
New Website Kickoff
Website Launch
Before & After
