Seeds of Peace
A new website to showcase how young leaders are transforming conflict in their communities
Madeo collaborated with Seeds of Peace to create a completely new website that gives exceptional youth and educators access to the skills and relationships they need to accelerate social, economic, and political changes essential for peace.
Overview
Since being founded in 1993 by the philanthropist John Wallach, Seeds of Peace has grown from a summer camp in Maine to a global organization with over 6,000 alumni throughout the Middle East, South Asia, Europe, and the United States working to lead change.
Madeo and Seeds of Peace have collaborated frequently, including on the latest complete overhaul of their website. The previous website was over five years old, and making it difficult for users to easily find the information they wanted, or donate and support the organization.
Website
A Madeo project frequently starts with a detailed discovery phase, for strategists and other team members to learn about the nuances of each project. We started this one with a big advantage: a treasure trove of data to analyze, and plenty of stakeholders to survey and interview.
Over the course of several weeks, we combed through website user data to uncover usage patterns and challenges that visitors faced; sent a survey to staff, supporters, board members, and other important groups to learn how they used the website and what they needed; and interviewed a few key stakeholders to learn more about how we could make the website a truly useful and powerful branch of Seeds of Peace as a whole.
We found that there were a few central areas to improve: showing the impact of Seeds of Peace alumni better, improving the digital tools available to staff to tell stories, and streamlining website navigation by significantly reworking the sitemap and making donations simple and easy.
After formulating our strategy and getting the Seeds of Peace team on board, we created a new condensed sitemap, wireframed layouts for pages with strategists and designers, and then our engineers implemented the site on a brand new technology installation.
Impact
With the new website, Seeds of Peace has a versatile and powerful new platform to tell compelling stories and generate effective support. The Madeo team helped Seeds of Peace staff have more options for content creation and distribution, including beautiful and flexible templates for alumni stories, news posts, organization history, and more. The result is a storytelling platform that can convey the important work Seeds of Peace alumni are doing worldwide, and make it approachable to any audience.
Through improved user experience design, we made it easy for people to learn about the many different aspects that make up Seeds of Peace and navigate the site logically. As a result of easier navigation and compelling impact being brought front and center, traffic and engagement on the donation and Get Involved pages has surged.
