The Scope
National Voter Education Week is an open-source, nonpartisan, annual voter education campaign that has brought together thousands of local, state, and national partners to educate millions of voters across the US.
Innovations
Bethink worked with the NVEW team in the run-up to the 2024 elections, making major updates to their existing website’s design and functionality, on a tight deadline, to improve clarity and user experience for voters, campaign partners, and the campaign team.
Streamlining WordPress Workflow
Through Gutenberg customizations, we were able to improve the functionality and workflow for the NVEW team on the back-end.
We added their brand colors into block themes in WordPress, making it possible to easily apply gradients and duotone filters to any visual elements. We built cross-functionality into the website that allowed changes to content appearing in multiple places to be made only once by linking reusable patterns for content in multiple locations. And we made it possible for their list of hundreds of partner organizations to be organized with one simple copy-paste.
Refreshing Design, Preserving Brand Continuity
The NVEW team had a very clear visual vision that we brought to life with our functional changes. We preserved their brand personality while modernizing the design of their website — redrawing their logo so that it could be vectorized, making the website’s structure more visually-focused, expanding their existing brand palette, and creating a style guide that mapped their colors and duotone gradient styles to branded parts of the website.
Reworking the User Experience
NVEW has multiple audiences: voters themselves, and the folks running voter education campaigns. Their website wasn’t working for either audience, so we sussed out the user journeys of both, mapped where they overlap, and planned for what those two audiences would need to find and see on the site and where to ensure clarity for website visitors, improve their funnels to engage with their audiences, and simplify how they presented key information.
Improving Information Architecture (and Search Results)
One major aspect of the NVEW build was architecting a data structure for their site content. We built an information architecture system that mimicked the user experience journeys we mapped with their team, and ensured the consistent use of structural tools like semantic headings, for example, to improve SEO rankings and AI search results.
Launch + Results
We conducted our standard training with the NVEW team, empowering them to build on our updated website design in the years ahead. Their team is now able to more easily update their own site content as needed, and their partners can more readily access critical campaign documents.