Progressive Politics

For some time after their launch as a Foundation, the Lambent Foundation functioned with a home page and a Filemaker database managed by the single Program Officer. They wanted their support of projects at the intersection of activism and the visual beauty and art that moves people to act to be represented by a more beautiful and descriptive website presence.

The Lambent Foundation approached CivicActions with the desire for visual design, Drupal website development and the integration of the Filemaker CRM they had been using.

"The project helped show us the user-centered design process from the ground up. It showed how effective the process was and how we could do it ourselves in the future... We had read books about usability testing and user-centered design, but you helped us learn the skills and demystified the process. It’s a new skillset that our organization can continue to use on our own." 

-Daniel Newman, Co-Founder, Executive Director of MapLight.org

Challenge

The Women's Economic Security Campaign is a shared project between The Women's Funding Network, Chicago Foundation for Women, Women's Foundation of California and Women's Foundation for a Greater Memphis. The goal of the campaign is to use the power of women's funds to increase economic opportunities for women and their families. Investing in women-led solutions and policy education, the collaboration emphasizes lasting solutions to bring women out of poverty.

NDN wanted capitalize on CivicActions' technology expertise and alignment with their mission to develop a technology roadmap that would enable the organization to realize aggressive communication and growth goals for the coming 5 years. Technology was in the way, with content split between two websites on different platforms, no central database, and little knowledge of the best way to reach their most important constituent groups.

The American Friends Service Committee came to CivicActions with a problem. Both AFSC staff and their supporters found their website site difficult to navigate; content was hard to find and often out of date. The site was performing poorly with search engines and had no formal search engine optimization. Additionally, the basic site structure and strategy had not been reviewed for more than five years and did not support organizational needs or current Internet trends.

As part of its pilot, the PolicyOption.org initiative used a wiki (see http://policyoptions.pbworks.com) where college students researched issue briefs as a start for their network of local community think tanks.

We're very happy to announce the launch of www.edtrust.org, the website of Education Trust, a DC-based non profit that:

NDN approached CivicActions with a big problem - their website had been taken offline and they urgently needed to get it back up and running and integrated with their existing Drupal based blog, NDNblog.org

After success on the website for the first season of ACLU's Freedom Files series, CivicActions re-engaged with ACLU for the second season's website.  CivicActions employed the Media Mover modules and FLV Media player to transcode episode samples and play them in the web browser – they same combination that powers the WITNESS Video Hub and many of our video websites.

A stellar team of internet and education leaders recently asked CivicActions to provide strategy, development, and design for MyGovernment.org, an online "town hall forum" that activates the average citizen to engage with their own government leaders.