The Scope
Bethink worked collaboratively with the Tract Association of Friends — a Quaker organization that has been publishing pamphlets, essays, and books for distribution, at cost, within the community of Friends for over 200 years — to build a future-proof website on a tight budget with updated functionality.
We wanted to make the existing legacy of this incredible organization shine through in their digital home — and preserve and extend it online for generations. Our build for the Association empowered them to continue their work as a publishing site and rightfully embrace their identity as a historical organization.
Innovations
The Association needed a digital platform that would endure in an accessible and sustainable way. Our team made it possible, for the first time in the organization’s history, for materials from their library to be available for purchase online with credit cards or other forms of digital payment — and empowered the Association and its team to continue collecting and sharing Quaker documents.
Restoring Access
By the time we began this project, none of the living leaders of the Association could access or update their existing website. We were able to restore access through the back-end, and re-point and re-use content from their existing website in our new build.
Moving forward, we were careful to build the Association a secure website with critical safeguards that ensured access and data protection for their organization and team in the long run.
Ethically Aligned Graphic Design
Given the ethos of the Friends community, modesty and functionality were critical in the design process. We redrew the Association logo, which was lo-res, so that it could be vectorized for future use — preserving the Association’s brand identity — and kept the website very simple and clean to align with the values of the Quaker faith.
We also echoed tracts themselves in the website’s format and structure, and matched the background cream background color to the physical paper the Association’s press uses to print their calendar.
Community-Based E-Commerce
Finding an e-commerce solution for the Association presented a unique challenge: Most e-commerce platforms are built on the idea that commerce is done for profit, not common purpose.
The Association’s mission and structure ruled out most typical e-commerce solutions, which were too cumbersome, too technical, and too costly for their team. We used Easy Digital Downloads, an open-source and customizable WordPress plugin, to ensure that the Association’s documents could still be available for download, printing, and ordering in bulk at cost — many for less than a dollar — and that the process of making new documents available would be streamlined for their team.
The Anti-Scale Build
We reduced the Association’s technical debt with our build, and aimed to prevent it moving forward with their new website.
Unlike most websites we build, the functionality of the Association’s is very narrow, because we know that the organization will be doing the same thing in 200 years that they’ve been doing for 200 years. Our focus, instead, was making that functionality as straightforward and modernized as possible: reducing how many steps it took to add or update tracts, for example, and engineering cross-functionality that allowed the same documents to be read in their publications library and be listed in their store.
Legacy Planning
We built a website for the Association that is as portable as possible, so that it can endure for the foreseeable future. We also provided recommendations for how to structure administration to ensure redundancy of access, preserving the legacy of the project, and created documentation for the Association, protecting their team’s capacity to edit the website throughout rotations in leadership.
Launch + Results
E-commerce orders began coming in immediately when The Tract Association’s new build launched. We know that together with their team, Bethink designed a website that successfully brought the Association’s work into the digital age.
We continue to provide ongoing support, including the addition of new materials to the website. In addition to doing a training with their current team on managing the new website, we also continue to work closely with our contact at the organization to ensure all decisions we made align with their capacity.