 So we're gonna go ahead and get started. Thanks everybody for joining us. I know this is the tail end of a very long week for some of you, but I am really excited to be here today to talk about the score.org redesign of Candice. For us, this is not just a story of how you can leverage UX to improve your brand, but it's also how to find a good partner and what that means in terms of working together. So a little bit about me. My name's Olivia Phillips. I'm the director of user experience at phase two. I've been in all sorts of UX-y roles on teams building and implementing digital products for about 18 years now. And the last three at phase two and well immersed in the land of Drupal. So I've gotten a lot of experience there and I am gonna turn it over to Candice so that she can tell us about herself and score. Great, thanks Olivia. My name is Candice Sinett. I'm the director of marketing at Score. I've been at Score for a little over seven years now in a number of different roles. And I think that experience with the organization really helped give me a thorough understanding not only of our end users, but also of our internal stakeholders. Score is a nonprofit resource partner with the US Small Business Administration. Our goal is to help start and grow small businesses in America. We do that through our free mentoring and our low or no cost educational workshops. Both services are which are available either online or at one of our 320 plus chapters across the US. In addition to our free mentoring and our workshops, we also have a wealth of business tools and resources on our website, score.org. This includes free templates like business plan templates, financial projections templates, checklists, eGuides and eBooks, all on how to be a successful business owner. Since our inception in 1964, we have helped a number of small businesses including brands like Jelly Belly, Jelly Beans and Bear Bradley. We have helped over 11 million clients on their path to entrepreneurship. And on average, we helped start a little over 50,000 businesses per year. About the score brand, like I mentioned, we started in 1964. And score used to be an acronym that stood for Service Corps of Retired Executives. But we're trying to get away from that brand because that's not who we are anymore. Our volunteers are no longer just retired executives. Many of them still own small businesses or are actively employed as top level executives at larger companies. We are very much people focused. Score is people. Besides a small staff at our headquarters office in Herndon, Virginia, we are run primarily by our volunteers. We have over 11,000 volunteers across the US. So again, we are a contemporary organization keeping pace with the times. And our working style is helpful, optimistic and accessible. Now, what does that have to do with this project? One of the goals, one of the challenges that we sought to overcome with our website redesign is to get away from that old stodgy feeling of I think what a lot of people know score to be. Beyond that, we were working without data technology. This site that we were on was launched in 2011 on Drupal 6. Since then, we had a number of vendors working on the site which led to a lot of erroneous code that was really slowing us down and just really not helping with our user experience. Helping with our user experience. It was hard to maintain and it didn't load. Exactly. Beyond that, the site that we had didn't really serve our goals of converting people to our services. When you landed on the site, it wasn't clear who we were or what we had to offer. The navigation which we'll touch on in a second made it very confusing for people to understand how they could get help from us. We also had unsatisfactory brand recognition. The site didn't really help strengthen our position as being business experts, especially since our site looked so outdated. How could you trust us to give you valid business advice if we couldn't even maintain our own website? In addition to the score national site, www.score.org, each of our chapters had an online presence. Many of the chapters were on our old Drupal 6 template, but a lot of them ventured off on their own and created their own websites. This led to a disjointed user experience where one site looked completely different from the other and you didn't know what to expect from score. In 2015 though, we decided it was time to update our site. We went through a full RFP process where we selected phase two as our partner. So first let me say that at phase two we were excited about working with score because many of us before coming to phase two, being out on their own, had actually been clients with score. So it was kind of cool to get them help and help support their mission. We're really focused today on the UX and how that built the brand, but there was much more to what we've been doing with score. As Candace said, they were on Drupal 6. We moved them to Drupal 7 and there was also a large content migration. They have a lot of advice and a lot of templates and we had to make sure that those came over and were easy to find. So where was score? Candace reminded me last night, I forgot that under business advice, startup, et cetera, those were actually dropdowns, which meant that the score.art home page had 54 navigation items in the header from the home page alone. This was one of the biggest usability problems for the end user because you just didn't know where to start. And yeah, I think even for me when we first came on I was like, whoa, so what is this doing again? So we went through a discovery process to help figure out how we can solve some of the challenges that Candace talked about. I'm sure everybody here in the room has been through this, I'm not gonna dwell on it too much, but two things I wanted to drive home about this that was really critical for our success is one was the partnership. We asked questions, we talked a lot, we really worked to understand where score was coming from, advice to anybody who's on the other side who's actually looking for an agency. If your agency isn't asking you questions, be afraid. You can't design a solution for a problem you don't understand, so it's really important. The other thing I wanted to point out is the audience needs score. Fortunately for us had a wealth of information, yearly client feedback scores along with sort of daily inputs from the website and out in the field, personas, they had Google Analytics set up, so we had a lot of information that we could pull from to really see what people were doing on the site and what the audience needed. When it came down to the design process, we really started with that navigation and the idea was score has four audiences. The four audiences are all important, but the primary audience is the small business person and the entrepreneur. So those are the people that we need to make sure when they come here the first time they're successful. Taking scores, main services, the mentoring, the workshops, and the library of resources and connecting it with that audience, we came up with a primary navigation scheme of ask, learn, connect. And we had to test it before we launched to make sure that was actually a good idea. We did this through Treejack testing. I love Treejack. If you don't know what it is, go find out. They're great. They're not paying me to say this optimal workshop. And stakeholder feedback sessions. So we worked with the volunteer task force and I'm gonna let Candice spend just a minute telling you about the volunteer task force because this was really important for our success as well. Absolutely and an organization like ours where we have 11,000 volunteers that we're designing for all with a difference in knowledge levels and skill sets whenever it comes to websites and content strategy. We found that it was critical to our success to involve them from the very start of the project all the way through implementation. So we selected a group of about six to 10 of the most vocal and opinionated volunteers from our organization to participate in this project. And what it helped do is to get buy-in from our field organization whenever we said, we considered your needs throughout every step of this process. And it, like I said, it was definitely critical to the success of this project and it helped us understand their needs as they're one of our users as well. So what did we find out? Well, we found out that Ask Learn Connect is a little bit too obscure for people. We needed to get to the point. And so what we came up with was this, find a mentor, take a workshop, browse the library. As you can see, we've gone from 54 navigation items to eight. So people coming to the website now actually know what SCORE does. They have mentorship in workshops and it's very clear. Another thing that we did in terms of listening to the needs of the audience, audience as Candice said being volunteers and the national site administrators themselves was the idea of these flexible content bands that we used on the homepage and the landing page. So in administrator, you had flexibility to quickly update the site, yet you had a set amount and different pre-styled options to kind of keep the brand consistent while flexibility to put what you needed on there. So that was the national site. This is the chapter sites, which I think most people are most interested in is how do you take 320 sites and make them look like they all belong to the same organization. While Candice talks about it, I'm gonna kind of show some screenshots of what the chapters look like before. Absolutely. As I mentioned before, the webmasters for each of our chapters are volunteers, many with different levels and experience with creating and maintaining websites. With our old website template on the Drupal 6 platform, it was very rigid. It didn't allow them to customize for their local markets. So while some of our chapters were on our template, a lot of them created their own sites. So you can see that we had just a different look and feel and different priorities, content priorities across these sites. And one of our goals with this project was to streamline that so that everyone had the same choices across the site and so that we had uniformity of brand across these different chapter sites. So when designing the national site, we kept those flexibility needs and those customization needs in mind and decided that that would serve as the basis for the chapter templates. So this is sort of a before and after of one of our chapter sites. This is Raleigh. What you see on the left hand side is the old site where they were limited to customizing just that left hand column. Whereas on the new site, they have total flexibility except for changing those main menu items, the main navigation, they can customize everything else which definitely helped with adoption across our chapter sites. So just zooming in a little bit so you can see the difference. I mean, this very much looks like the national site but there are little things that we've done to allow chapters to add that local flavor. There is this, so the chapters found this nice little hack before where they would go into the system and change their chapter name, their official score chapter name to these really long crazy names to make the rest of the area around them feel more included and it would break the template and it would mess up all the reports and it would do all these horrible things. So we gave the chapters a way to express this in a controlled manner. That's still, from chapter to chapter, you'll see that it's custom but it still looks the same. And again, as Candace said, find a mentor, take a workshop, browse the library. Those are there across all the sites, they can't change them. They can change the secondary navigation as well as the utility nav to meet local needs because they do have different, as you can see in this example, they added our mentors so that they could have a narrowed view of the different mentors that just served that chapter. And they have full customization of the hero area. As you go to another chapter, you'll see the image, the call to action has changed. They've even added in San Francisco, we gave this social media bar. So I don't know, I'm sure you didn't memorize the score homepage when we showed it from 2015, but every possible social media outlet in the universe was in the header and it was really cluttered. And so we moved that to the footer and listening to the chapter feedback, they were worried that it was buried. So we gave this option that you can move it up to the top and some needed it and some didn't. So I'm gonna hand it back over to Candace to talk about the results. So besides just looking a lot better and a lot more contemporary than what we had in 2011, this site really helps meet our needs in terms of driving conversions and driving the metrics that we care the most about. You'll see year over year, we've had increases in both site visits, unique visitors and page views, just with the improved navigation and design. And of course as a marketer, I love to see these numbers. Beyond just improving our traffic metrics, we have seen a 16% increase in our conversion rate. We've seen, I believe it's a 14 or 17% increase in organic search traffic. So again, these are all metrics that we cared about and really put at the forefront when designing the site. Some other results. We have heard from all of our stakeholders that they are very pleased with the end product. This is a quote from one of our volunteers and again, coming from one of our volunteers who has experienced running their own company and calling the shots to get this kind of positive praise is just huge for us. But they were very pleased, not only with the look and feel of the website, but also for the phased rollout where we migrated all of that content for them and took on most of the work so that they had very little to do with their new site. So something Candace is a little bit modest about, but I do want to point out is the volunteer task force that she talked about, which she gave all these nice adjectives for, I will use the one disgruntled. I was in these meetings and it was not always pleasant, but this is coming from someone who was actually actively antagonistic at some point and they have turned around and because of all the hard work Candace put in and including them is now a huge advocate to help other chapter volunteers realize the benefits of the new site. I also think it's because we designed with the end user in mind. I mean, the user experience was our highest priority and though we definitely designed the site thinking about the small business owner that's coming to us looking for help, we really considered the needs of our volunteers as well. So I think putting the user first is again critical to the success of any project. This is a comment from one of our site users. We use, since we launched the site in June of 2016, we enabled a useabilla feedback mechanism on the site where we can collect feedback from our end users. They can capture a screenshot of the portion of the site that they wanna get feedback on and send us their comments directly. So this is just one of the comments, one of the many positive comments that we've received since launching the new website. Before we move on to, I'm gonna ask Candace for her advice in going through this in a second, but one of the things that I thought was interesting is Candace and I were working on this presentation together. I came in in the beginning and then I kinda left and now we're in growth and support mode with the rest of the team and so I haven't been around the last couple months to see the impact, so all of these results and stuff are also exciting to me as someone who helped design it. But with the chapter sites, how many holdouts do you have now to use the new chapter template? You know, that's a great question. When we started the project, we had about 40 chapters that had created their own websites outside of the score system. Since we launched and rolled this out, we now only have about five or eight that are still a little reluctant to adopt the new website, but they're open to the dialogue and they're considering it and I have no doubt that they will be on board by October. And again, it's, yes. I'm at phase two, did a really great job and again, it's all because I think we put their needs first. So Candice, what's your advice for someone going through redesign? Sure, so one of the things that we found was helpful was to ground all decisions in data. As Olivia mentioned earlier, we started this project looking at all of the feedback that we had received from our end users, from our sponsors, from our volunteers and use that to really inform the decisions that we made throughout the process. We also used a number of tools to help collect this information and to guide our efforts. You'll see some of them on the screen. I mentioned Isabella, Google Analytics. We did surveys through constant contact. The validation through Treejack was tremendously helpful because we were moving in the wrong direction and it helped set us on the correct course. And then currently we're using Optimizely to do AB and multivariate testing on the site to make future improvements. And all of these tools are in some way integrated into the current score site. So even when we ran Treejack for a limited time, we actually put it on the site so that we weren't just getting targeted users that were familiar with score. We were getting new people that were coming to the score website for the first time to get a broad range of audience feedback there. And then the final. Yes, my last piece of advice is to find a true partner. In my time of score, I've taken on a number of projects and worked with a number of vendors and I can say with all honesty, and they didn't pay me for this, but I really enjoyed the experience with phase two. They were a true partner and collaborated with us every step of the way, really working to understand our needs, understand our volunteers, tolerate our volunteers as we develop this in product. So I would recommend that you, when you're going through the process of selecting a vendor, you find somebody that's really gonna work with you and be as invested in this project as you are. Thanks, and I'll say that working with score was great. We forced them to answer all our questions even when they wanted us to go away and just build something. We continued throughout the process. We had in-person, once we even got into implementation, in-person sprint planning sessions, so we'd sit in with our big cards on a wall for three hours at a time, and they were right there with us. And so it really empowered score to make decisions to understand why things needed to be done a certain way and also to give us feedback that maybe we should think of a new way to do so. And it, as you can see in the results, it was very successful. So what is next for score? Sure. As I said, we're gonna continue to tinker with the site. We're gonna keep collecting data from our end users, collect the data from our AB testing and use that to make additional improvements on the site. There were also some things that we wanted to do when we first embarked on this project that we didn't get to do. So I think we'll work through that backlog and tackle those projects as we continue to work together. Then of course, we wanna start planning now for our next redesign. We don't wanna wait until the site gets outdated again before updating it. And of course, there's Drupal Lake that we have to consider migrating to. So that's what's next for score. Questions? Could you speak to my voice? Thank you. Does anyone have any questions about this experience or planning a redesign or a website project for a non-profit with as many sites as we have? Can you maybe expound on how you collected user feedback? Cause we've run like user sentiment surveys on our site and try to keep them as short as possible, but always curious to hear how other people do it. Sure. That's a great question. And it's one that we employed a number of different tools to try to collect feedback from different users. We mentioned Treejack where we made that live on our site where anybody who came to our site could see the new site map and share with that and give us feedback on that. We also have subscribers to our newsletter and we sent them a survey through constant contact that just said, you know, what is it that you're looking for in a website, what could we do better? What would you like to see in the next version of our website? With our volunteer base, they, I mean, they have no problem getting us their opinion, but we would jump on any kind of internal training calls or any internal communications and send plugs there. So we basically put it everywhere to try to collect as much feedback as possible if that helps answer your question. Yeah, we just do like a simple five question like on a scale of one to five, how helpful did you find this information kind of thing? So, Treejack sounds interesting. Yeah, and that Treejack is kind of like an in-between stage. It's like before you actually get into develop and start mucking around with your IAA on the actual site, you can kind of, you know, let users try to find information in a safe way. Usabila is what Candace pulled some information from for this, is working great for them too. And it's like if you go to score.org, I don't wanna blow up my computer right now, but it's just a little feedback button and it allows people to come in and kind of select an area of the site on the screen and provide feedback about that, like the real, so that may be helpful as well. We used a lot of open-ended questions so that people could just say whatever. And we tried to organize that as best as we could in different categories to help really drive and shape the project. Cool, thank you. I may have missed it when you were talking. Can you talk more about the hosting that you're doing as far as the 320 sites? Are there more so locations that they have? Or are you doing OG groups or multi-sites? What is your solution that you're doing on that to deliver? Olivia? You can email, no, sorry. Our software architect isn't here today. Molly, do you remember what we, I'm gonna let our account director jump in here. So we're, it's all in one database. So it's actually one site with multiple different chapters, but it's sharing a database. I think, I don't know if it's using OG or not, so I'm not sure, but it's one site that helps. Yes, it is. Each chapter is actually a content type. If you, if that makes sense to you. 320 different instances of the chapter content type. We can, we can find out for you. Okay, definitely can. I'm sorry, it was a year ago. Any other questions? Thank you so much for your time and attention. Thank you.