Social Justice

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.

Fenton Communications approached us for development support on the CapacityPlus.org site they were in the process of designing. We felt immediate alignment with Fenton, given their mission "…(to) serve the public interest by creating powerful issue campaigns that make change." Fenton's clients have contributed to some of the defining change movements of the past quarter century, from ending apartheid and curbing global warming to protecting people from harmful toxins.

With an active, very passionate and ever-growing audience, Democracy Now! was looking to implement a constituent relationship management system to improve their ability to inform, rally and garner support from their viewers. At the top of their list of requirements for this system was that they could inform and mobilize their audience in a respectful way. This meant empowering the audience member who signed up to specify how and when they would like to be contacted.

In their groundbreaking model, EPA train the youth staffs with an eye toward social enterprise, that is, to empower these vibrant young men and women to develop and run their own for-profit technology services company in their local community—providing income and skill-building opportunities for them while helping their fellow community members with their for-profit or community activism enterprises.

EcoTuesday is a social venture startup that needed a website to tell its story, connect members to one another, and make it easy for participants to sign up for events.

We began our engagement with a detailed discussion of strategy to determine the priority of features, as well a solution to meet the future needs of a growing organization. Open source tools were the preference of the client, which aligned with their core value of sustainability.

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.

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.

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

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.

Where It's At NYC is another great example of a mostly "out-of-the box" drupal implementation. The defining characteristic of the site's implemention is its principal navigation structure based on a large (200+ term) taxonomy written in the form of first person "I" statements like "I need emergency housing services", "I have questions about STI's HIV, AIDS and other related issues". These statements are organized into five "domains"--education, employment, health, housing, and social--reflecting the broadest categorization of the social service resources listed on the site.