Do you love the outdoors? It’s time to give back! Volunteers for Outdoor Colorado (VOC) is a Colorado non-profit that activates citizens to become engaged stewards of the outdoors. VOC operates a statewide volunteer program that brings together individuals of all ages, interests and backgrounds to work in wildfire and flood restoration, trail building and maintenance, tree planting and reforestation, and much more. VOC’s Outdoor Stewardship Institute provides training for volunteer leadership, state government and other environmental stewardship organizations. VOC works to increase Colorado’s capacity for stewardship by conducting studies on volunteer impact and through collaboration with the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management.
We leveraged our Discovery Process to help VOC identify their website’s goals and users. Exposing VOC’s volunteer opportunities to unrealized event participants was the greatest priority. VOC’s very localized opportunities added some complexity to this end. We knew their potential volunteers would find the greatest utility through easily accessing opportunities nearest to them and in their personal area of interest. Integrating the website with VOC’s membership tracker, Civicore would allow seamless tracking of registrations and volunteers. Their web presence also needed to function well on any platform, from megatron to phone, in case volunteers needed last minute directions or to register a few more attendees.
Our User Story and Wireframing process solidified VOC’s goals into concrete site functionality and design. We built two large areas to feature volunteer opportunities on the front page of the site, a completely customizable event rotator and upcoming list. The front page displays direct users to regional silos, where they can drill down by type of activity, physical difficulty, and date. The localized opportunities are available in grid, calendar and map views. All of the volunteer opportunities on the site are directly fed in from Civicore. This integration ensures that creating opportunities and maintaining registrations is simple and requires little intervention from VOC’s staff. The look and feel of the design marries contemporary, urban aesthetics with rugged, outdoor and athletic accents and textures. The design also works well for devices of all sizes and was designed from mobile up.
VOC’s partnership with the Open Media Foundation resulted in a web presence that has proven to serve their communities’ needs. The website, while rich in functionality, requires minimal staff maintenance allowing VOC to focus on its mission. The Open Media Foundation’s passionate and experienced staff leverages open source tools and provides a 50% matching grant to make great technology services available to every non-profit big or small.
