Climate XChange provides research, education, and advocacy towards a low-carbon economy through market-based mechanisms. After redesigning the Climate Action Business Association’s (CABA) website, our Creative Director and Project Manager, Kalman Gacs, was invited to join the Climate XChange board, and they hired us to work on two additional redesigns: this main website, and the organization’s annual Tesla Raffle landing page.
Why Viv
Aside from our mutually good experience working with their teams before, Climate XChange knew we could work on a lean budget and had the technical chops to integrate fundraising functionality on the website.
Empowering Internal Teams
We built the entire site with the Climate XChange team in mind. Knowing they make daily updates to the content, we never wanted to keep the keys to the castle but ensure they could work independently and be nimble with their desired updates.
The Results
The new site offers inspiring content for legislators, businesses, donors, job seekers, and the general public. The website has helped Climate XChange build its following beyond Massachusetts.
Building a content-rich website
Climate XChange is a content-rich website with articles published on a near-daily basis. This project involved a major content migration from the previous website. Challenges around image formats and other embedded content can create bugs, so the Climate XChange team appreciated Viv’s deep development and WordPress expertise.
Rethinking branding and logo design
Climate XChange’s previous logo had more of an intellectual, almost literary feeling. The new logo better expresses the efficiency and dynamism that reflects the organization’s ethos.
We found a font for the X that both reads very clearly but also has a distinct character. The previous logo emphasized the word exchange, which was confusing. The new logo eliminated]s that confusion and makes it easier to read the words “Climate Change,” emphasizing the organization’s mission and impact.
Empowering Internal Teams
Since we redesigned this website, the internal team has been able to use it to create a variety of new sections and to build custom designed content. We continually work with them to keep within budget and empower them to reach their communication goals.
A Customizable Donation Platform
We integrated GiveWP, a WordPress based donation system with very deep customization and a clear user interface that really emphasizes monthly giving, which has been shown to improve fundraising outcomes.
Evolving Content and Site Features
The content of the Climate XChange website is constantly evolving given their frequent publications. For example, we worked with the internal team recently to create fundraising leadership tears, which now structure their giving levels.
The state carbon pricing map is another example of an evolving collaboration with the internal team. They helped do the research on what WP plugin they wanted to use, and their graphic designer did a lot of work around what headers images and featured images they wanted to use. We are happy to keep our involvement on these types of updates lean to save the client money and empower them to keep improving the site.
Engaging and Delighting Readers
The infinite scroll on this site invites browsing and seeking activity.
In addition to the donate button, another key call-to-action on the site is the newsletter sign-up, which is embedded on the sidebar of most pages.
The event call-out on the homepage is also important. In order to set up a good way to call out events, this section needed to look equally good with one event or more, depending on the time of year.
The website also includes job posts with contact forms.
Keeping Content Easy-to-Navigate
Content tagging and categorization is important to create a clean and organized website. We created landing pages for each category of content to reinforce the idea that you can just keep discovering content that is of interest to you.
The “you might also like” feature facilitates a similar experience of continuously discovering new content.
In addition, Climate XChange authors also have a page, structuring the content in yet another way.
An empowered client team
The site embeds podcast players using SoundCloud, which keeps readers on the site rather than requiring them to listen to audio elsewhere.
WPBakery – formerly Visual Composer – is a cornerstone of the Viv toolkit and it allows for the client to create a myriad of custom content styles and formats and solutions.
Webinars also live on a landing page, and readers can just play them right there. This showcases the power of WordPress, which enables the ClimateXChange team to add media and media types as they become available.
