Industry:
Client:
Solution:
The Southwest Virginia Workforce Development Board is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that provides workforce services to individuals and businesses throughout far southwestern Virginia.
Their support system helps job seekers overcome barriers they may face as they look for work while connecting them to our region’s businesses for employment opportunities. The Southwest Virginia Workforce Development Board is helping to build a stronger workforce in two ways: help the individual build a career, and the businesses to help them grow their small business by finding employees.
Some challenges that the Southwest Virginia non-profit was facing with their website:
Targeting and messaging challenge with the two different ways that they help the two audiences. This created a struggle with lack of organization. Additionally, not all of the available programs were easy to find or was confusing on the site because of this.
There were multiple steps to this non-profit website design. First, we started with solidifying the brand messaging and identifying the target audience for the Southwest Virginia Workforce Development Board.
The first thing that their audiences would see is the headline “Be the Change” on the home page. This carries the SouthWest Virginia Workforce Development Board’s mission of believing in the potential of others and changing people’s lives. Additionally, they are changing the community and the local culture. They help constituents who are at their wits’ end, such as displaced workers who might not even have a place to live.
Our team provided a brand audit as a part of their discovery session and took a close look at all of the existing content, logos, documents, and more to identify a creative strategy for their new website.
A deep dive helped solidify who the client was serving, how they were serving them, and how the website could function as a tool to help. Top audiences included job seekers, businesses, and partners. Therefore, we structured the entire site to cater to those audiences. We created messaging that leads with brand mission, and supports that target audience throughout the website.
Their programs and the grants can change, by organizing the site by the user journey, we were better able to better manage the programs and grants with updates.
We focused on putting the brand front and center and actually utilizing the brand, typography, color palette, and a clean and easy to navigate design approach.
We incorporated actual pictures from the Southwest Virginia Workforce Development Board instead of stock photos to help the website feel more authentic.
Resource Library creation
We created a resource library to have all forms and policies easy to find easy to manage on the site and accessible to businesses, partners, and job seekers alike.
Online service request forms
We implemented online service request forms for job seekers and businesses (which used to be paper forms only) so they could automatically have the first step to access support and speed up the process.
Personal Experience
To make the organization feel more approachable, the team incorporated staff photos onto the website to be able to build the relationship with case manager and job seeker/business of the particular program.
Blog Post Design
Our team revamped the blog layout so that there is a cleaner navigation.
All of this could not be possible without the SouthWest Virginia Workforce Development Board team. They helped assist on the project with how they can support their mission even further. The Ladybugz team worked with an all-female leadership team. This team helped solidify the brand and design of the website for this non-profit.
