The Scope
Bethink collaborated with New Era Colorado Action Fund, a political organization building youth political power across the state, ahead of the 2024 elections. Together, we brought their materials to life in digital space — and created a reimagined digital home for their critical work.
Innovations
The major focus of our build for NECAF was building and designing a digital version of their elaborate voter guide. Along the way, we were able to use the templates we’d created for that content to repopulate the rest of their website content.
Scraping + Reshaping the Site
NECAF’s previous site was built on WordPress almost exclusively through Advanced Custom Fields, which meant automated migration would leave massive gaps in site data. We scraped the old site, manually moving content from the front-end to ensure no information was lost in translation.
We also reassessed the NECAF brand guide in collaboration with their team — offering advice on how they could interpret, expand, and better utilize their color palette, asset suite, and brand personality, and adjust their brand guide standards for accessibility.
Digitizing Voter Guides
Preserving the eye-catching nature of NECAF’s voter guides as we brought them into digital space was a priority, and we achieved it through a collaborative process of content organization and visualization. We gave their team a content deck that they filled in to let us know what they wanted in each section of the digital guide, and we acted to bring their vision to life.
Crafting Candidate Scorecards
We also designed a candidate scorecard functionality for NECAF, transforming raw survey data into consumable visual information. We started by talking with the NECAF team about the research and their research process to think through how to engineer a solution that would communicate the spirit of the work — then, we prototyped multiple structures for the scorecards, testing each one and collecting feedback from NECAF to see what worked and didn’t work.
With every iteration, we got closer to our goal of making this information usable for the average youth voter.
Mapping the User Experience
We were intentional about designing successful journeys for users through the voter guide. We crunched Google Analytics data for the NECAF website and conducted user testing at various steps in the process to collect feedback that informed how we organized and structured the voting guide.
Dynamic Information Architecture
As part of the voter guide functionality, we engineered three rotating information architecture structures: one for major election cycles with multiple races and initiatives, one for single races, and one for off-cycle elections. NEC’s team can swap in whichever they need when the political moment calls for it.
In addition to re-organizing their content, we also set up a series of redirects that NEC can turn off and on as needed as content changes within their voter guides. This way, their SEO doesn’t tank when an election season ends.
Multilingual Build
We architected the build to ensure that the voter guide content was multilingual — and laid the groundwork through implementation of WPML for NEC to eventually extend that functionality across its other site content.
Launch + Results
The 2024 Voter Guide was viewed 52,073 times after our redesign — and the organization had a lot to celebrate after the elections. Their voter guide proved impactful across the state, and they saw many victories in the races and initiatives where they took a stand.
Despite national results, young people in Colorado bucked national youth voter trends with turnout levels on par with historic 2020 levels. Colorado’s young voters turned out at 69 percent, 27 points higher than the national average for youth turnout—and New Era’s base turned out at an even higher rate of 86 percent.
By bringing the voter guide online, we believe we boosted their success — and because we also brought a lot of meaty content about NEC’s work into their website copy, we know we boosted their SEO.
We created a live documentation portal for the NECAF team that serves as a reference guide for the block patterns, text styles, and formats we built into the website for their work moving forward. We also had the chance to watch our navigation “switch” functionality be put into place as they entered the 2025 election cycle — in which their voter guide is focused on just one race.
We continue to build features and functionalities for NECAF as their organizing grows.