Louisville Institute
Crafting a brand and a website that fulfills an important mission.
Louisville Institute is a Lilly Endowment supported foundation that supports the causes of religion, education, and community development. The impact they have in the Louisville community and beyond is great, and we were able to help them tell that story and reach a more diverse group of grantees. As ongoing partners, we have worked alongside Louisville Institute to constantly adapt to change. Whether it be aesthetic upkeep or changing goals/priorities for the end user, we have remained agile and responsive to all moving targets.
Louisville Institute was already established and grounded, but the problem was, so was their audience. This was limiting the outreach to more diverse grantee applicants. The challenge was to create a mark and a brand that didn’t stray too far from current collateral, but provided a thoughtful refresh to the look, feel, and utility of Louisville Institute. It started with an updated logo and identity.
The Website
The primary objectives with the website were to update and expand the Louisville Institute brand and make the grantee process more approachable and welcoming. We also needed to diversify the grantee audience and the outcome of their research by making things more current, accessible, and most of all, EASY.
We created our own framework for an eligibility quiz so people could find out if they were eligible to apply for grants. We were able to make the process of applying more intuitive and a more branded experience.
The problem: The previous quiz was too complex. We were asking a lot from our users by requiring them to go through this multi-sectioned, multi-questioned process.
The solution: We could streamline the process by leveraging overlap in the quiz logic. We needed to break down said logic and identify existing parallels in order to simplify.
The result: We tested our “If this, then that” scenarios by prototyping out the quiz flow in UXPin. We found that the quiz was able to be broken down into just 2 questions “I am ⦔ and “Interested in ⦔. The combinations stemming from those 2 prompts covered all of our bases.
The outcome is a straight-forward, to the point, much improved user experience.
Louisville Institute uses a custom WordPress plugin which contains all of the HTML templates used by the front-end. The content of these templates is exposed via custom REST API endpoints.
The plugin uses a stripped down version of the Laravel PHP framework, as well as the Corcel library to allow Laravel to access the WordPress back-end. The plugin also includes all of the custom admin functionality that LI needs to manage grants & proposals.
The WordPress theme contains an Angular 1.5 JavaScript application which is responsible for loading the templates exposed by the WordPress plugin. This gives the end-user a zippy, single-page JavaScript application to use to manage their LI account.
