America Saves is a non-profit organization backed by the Consumer Federation of America. The organization exists to educate and encourage Americans across many groups to save more money and create sustainable futures. There are 5 main initiatives that all have slightly different purposes and content. We set out to build a cohesive, yet unique, experience for each one, all centrally organized and managed from one Umbraco installation.

The Solution

Analysis & Discovery

One of the largest tasks for this project was the analysis and coordination of all the content that was being migrated from the existing Joomla sites. One of our senior Product Managers (he’s also a business analyst, PM, and wears many other hats), organized everything to ensure that we were planning our content structure and widget designs as efficiently as possible. This produced a visual to ensure that we weren’t creating duplicate document types, designing templates and widgets that we don’t need, and most importantly to reduce the amount of maintenance the client has to do on an ongoing basis. It looked a little something like this:

Of course, there were plenty of other artifacts from this process, like sitemaps, wireframes, and design mood boards.

Designs

We set out to create designs that align with the relatively recent logo and brand design that the non-profit organization completed before contracting Scandia. We had three major audiences that we wanted to design for and we think we nailed it.

The Pledge

This is not our pledge (although some of us have certainly signed up for it). The Pledge is what America Saves uses to allow people to sign up and commit to saving more by choosing specific targets or life events that they want to save for. With this tool in hand, the consultants at America Saves can target content to the users that sign up and provide them with the education they need to reach their goals. In addition to that, the Pledge is built to support local campaigns (think meetup groups and initiatives near you), employer pledge certificates with matching savings, and so much more. We started to craft the pledge solution even before we got the project (ahem….we think that’s what pushed us over the finish line as compared to the competition). The result is a highly configurable and fully integrated solution that puts the control of where and how to deploy this tool at the fingertips of the content editors. Way better than any off-the-shelf product and 100% more user-friendly (yeah, that’s a science fact :)

Integrations

There are a TON of calls-to-action and potential touchpoints throughout the user journeys. Before contacting us, America Saves had settled on Microsoft Dynamics as its core CRM and email communication platform. We built out both custom API integrations with Dynamics and also configured ways for the client to use Dynamic’s form capture capabilities. As a result, the client can choose to use a custom Umbraco Forms workflow that we built to send collected data to the Dynamics API, or simply manage forms in Dynamics and embed on pages using our widget structure.

The Result

At this point, America SAves are well on their way to reach a lofty goal of getting 1,000,000+ pledges collected from their various web properties. We are thrilled to have been a part of realizing that goal and look forward to working with the entire marketing team there for years to come.