The Donovan’s Venom

Branding, Website Redesign

The Donovan’s Venom is a nonprofit organization based in the USA. It was founded by The Donovan, a musician and philanthropist, to make music accessible to underserved populations.

Needs

The Donovan needed a website that could communicate his nonprofit’s mission to potential donors, volunteers, and students. The one already set up had quite a few issues as seen in the photo below.

The goal was to redesign and reorganize the website to better communicate The Donovan’s Venom’s main mission and make it easier for users to browse.

Implementation

Taking inspiration from other nonprofits, I redesigned The Donovan’s Venom’s whole website in WordPress. These were some notable things I did:

  • Created the copy “Enhancing our communities through music” to clearly state the organization’s work with a header photo of someone who could be a student.

  • Sectioned off various parts of the homepage for clarity.

  • Rewrote copy for every page of the website to speak to multiple audiences.

  • Create a more organized menu with some link hierarchy.

Scroll within the prototype to see more.

Usability Testing

We conducted usability tests on the two identified user groups (donors and students). We worked with a total of 9 users. Three were donors, and six were students. Half of the students were tested on the mobile version.

Users were asked to give their first impressions on our website, complete some tasks, and rate the tasks on how easy they were.

The responses were overwhelmingly positive. Below are the notes I took of the users’ comments. I made note of their pain points, suggestions, and positive comments.

Most users…

  • found the website clean, simple, and easy to navigate.

  • understood the services that our organization provided.

  • noted that the phrase “Enhancing Our Communities Through Music” helped them see our mission.

  • liked pictures of smiling children.

All of our users completed their tasks successfully. Among them, 7 out of 9 rated the tasks as “very easy” (with the rating of 5). In addition, 6 out of 9 participants finished all of the tasks in one minute or less. Below is the result from all of the users that participated in the test.

However, we found the following problems that we needed to address:

  • One user indicated that she did not know the name of our organization because the logo at the top was too small.

  • Some users wanted to see a link for volunteers.

  • One parent tried to find a list of things we teach by looking under “FAQs” and “About” but found nothing.

  • Some donors wanted more pictures and reviews of students benefiting from the donations.

We went ahead and fixed the website to remedy these problems.

Improvement

After the first round of testing, I made changes to address the concerns that the users and The Donovan had.

Results

This website redesign has allowed The Donovan to grow the organization and reach more people. Three years later, these were some of the organization’s achievements:

  • DeKalb County in Georgia funded a pilot program with The Donovan for 115 students. The students showed an 87% increase in test scores after just 12 weeks with his music-based lessons.

  • Over 1,000 families were served through the organization’s various educational and community initiatives.

  • While there were only two volunteers when I joined, the organization grew to a network of over 80 volunteers when I left.