Award-winning design strategy for Community Integrated Services helps young adults with disAbilities

Community Integrated Services (CIS) is a nonprofit with a social mission to empower individuals with disAbilities by providing employment opportunities, fostering self-care and sustainability, and bringing equality and community involvement for all persons. CIS partners with other local Philadelphia businesses and organizations to allow its benefactors to reach their employment goals, ensuring they enjoy meaningful work, independence, inclusivity, and diversity in the workplace.

The problem

CIS’s old website did not provide a clear user experience. Users could not easily find content they needed. On a technical side, the website was not secure and was difficult to update. The website did not have the information architecture and clear foundations to support its structure. Most importantly, the website was not friendly and accessible for its primary audience: disabled adults entering the workforce. Overall, the main requirement was providing a website that met the unique needs of its users whilst correcting the technical underlying structure. 

The solutions

In order to start understanding how to build the best website for its users, Key Medium needed to understand all of the unique stakeholders involved, such as community partners, advocates, disabled adults, and local nonprofits. Together, Key Medium discussed the project scope with all of those who would be affected by a redesign and rebuild. 

After our initial call following their grant application, we decided to complete a custom website redesign and brand refresh. The current website has easy-to-navigate content with a bar that has ‘About us’, ‘What we do’, ‘Career services’, ‘Hire talent’, and ‘Join us’ clearly labeled. Each menu has sub-categories such as in ‘What we do’, the menu explains employment services, school to work transition services, benefits counseling, Ticket to Work, CISWorks consulting, and ACRE training. The page also has a clear structure for case studies, where partners can hire people, how to get hired, and clear buttons and pathways from the homepage, none of which existed prior to the redesign. 

Key Medium also worked on their on-page SEO, their content strategy, and provided a supporting role in restructuring the information architecture. We implemented our complete SEO services and migrated their website from having dated code to WordPress. To further aid CIS in tracking future performance, we provided a custom data analytics dashboard to gauge performance in real-time.

CIS’s entire website, flow, story, and branding were reimagined. We designed large, bold visuals to keep the website accessible and user-friendly for all stakeholders.

The results

The dramatic development, design, branding, and messaging overhaul created impressive results.

• 17% lift in session time
• 38% lift in overall session
• 212% lift in traffic from social media

Overall, the website did what it was meant to: connecting people with disAbilities to career opportunities and providing local employers with access to a new talent pool.

Giving back

As part of Coding for Causes, Key Medium donated the design, development, branding, and more, empowering the CIS team to propel their impact immediately after launch.

Awards

Key Medium received a Gold Award in dotCOMM’s 2019 international awards competition honoring excellence in web creativity and digital communication. The dotCOMM Awards are administered and judged by the Association of Marketing and Communication Professionals (AMCP).
If your website could benefit from our design strategy and user-experience update, get in touch. To see more success stories, visit our case studies page.