The Pittsburgh Foundation

Introducing the Foundation's new website

Includes significantly improved scholarship search function

PITTSBURGH, Nov. 16, 2016 – Showcasing a lively design, improved search functions and updated content, The Pittsburgh Foundation launched its new website at www.pittsburghfoundation.org. The Foundation’s goal is improving the site as its most powerful communications tool for storytelling about the work of our grantees, donors, professional advisors and staff.

The site will also make it easier for users to find important content, including instructions for how to start a fund, grant application materials and lists of existing funds to which people may donate. Landesberg Design, Shift Collaborative and ClearMind Consulting partnered with the Foundation on this project. The website is the Foundation’s most widely used communications platform, reaching 11,000 to 14,000 users per month, of whom 7,000 to 10,000 are first-time visitors.

“The website is the only truly global communication that The Pittsburgh Foundation produces,” said President and CEO Maxwell King. “Now more than ever, it is incumbent upon philanthropy to include the people we serve and our partners in our work.” A website built on compelling stories and transparency, said King, enhances communication and brings people to the table. The Foundation also invested significantly in improving the scholarship search function on the site to increase the number of students who find, apply for and receive funding to further their education.

Landesberg Design, which designs the Foundation’s annual Report to the Community and FORUM quarterly reports, began working with the Foundation in May of last year to design the new website. Members of all departments were engaged in the process, which included review of the websites of other foundations and major nonprofits, review and revision of all content, and a focus on user experience. The Foundation’s longtime website consultant, Jeff Honnold, built the functionality of the site using Drupal. A team from Shift Collaborative, led by Sarah Mayer, worked to optimize the site for search and also collaborated with the Foundation’s Development and Program teams to make the highly trafficked “Giving” and “Grantmaking” sections of the site as user-friendly and intuitive as possible.

Highlights of the new website include:

  • Significantly improved use of multimedia materials, including compelling, large-format original photography of the Foundation’s grantees, donors and advisors; video and audio files, including a sampling of custom-recorded StoryCorps segments; and stories selected from the Foundation’s publications and regional media sources, which are now peppered throughout the site.
  • Improved content for grantees, including an eligibility quiz, contact information for specific program officers and detailed walk-throughs of the grant-making process, which then leads prospective grantees to an online grant portal to apply.
  • Significant improvements to the Scholarship Search function, which now uses faceted search. Faceted search is considered “the most significant search innovation of the past decade” and is used by retail giants Amazon and Zappos to show how many of a given item (in this case, scholarships for specific fields of study or for a particular university) are available for review.
  • Resources for professional advisors, including information about types of funds their clients may start at the Foundation, tools to describe charitable options to clients and testimonials from advisors who have worked with the Foundation to achieve their clients’ charitable goals.
  • Background information to make the site more transparent, such as staff biographies, blog posts, links to news coverage, audited financial statements and recent 990s, and feeds from the Foundation’s social media channels.

About the project partners: ClearMind Consulting is a cloud and data-focused programming company, based in Pittsburgh, PA, that focuses on web programming, server administration and database integrations. For The Pittsburgh Foundation's new website, ClearMind developed a content-managed, integrated approach, drawing on and connecting to information across its operational and development areas. The company is also responsible for the site’s transition to faceted search for scholarships.

“The work of The Pittsburgh Foundation is critical, and we are proud to work with them on an accessible, informative and engaging website to support these efforts,” said creative lead Tim Madle of Landesberg Design. The firm is a nationally recognized for communication design for institutions dedicated to advancing the common good, with more than 30 years of experience in identity and branding, print, web, and all other forms of visual communication. Landesberg is currently engaged in a comprehensive branding effort for the Foundation, and was responsible for site planning, design and front-end development of the new website. 

Shift Collaborative is a creative agency that specializes in helping businesses and nonprofits solve marketing and communications challenges. On this project, Shift assisted with content analysis, information architecture for the Grantmaking and the Giving sections, search engine optimization, and copyediting of the website. "The team at The Pittsburgh Foundation is full of wonderful ideas and knowledge that helped to inform and guide our work. We enjoyed working with the project team to get the site launched," said Sarah Mayer, partner at Shift Collaborative. 

Though the site has launched, the work to make it useful and compelling will continue. The Foundation will be adding new content regularly and using its social media feeds to drive traffic to the site and to increase dialog about issues that loom large in our community, such as poverty and income inequality, juvenile justice and generational poverty facing single women raising children, all of which are key factors in the Foundation’s 100 Percent Pittsburgh organizing principle.                                                   

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