Leap: A Non-Profit Website that Inspires and Informs
Communicating That Art in Education is Indispensable
BACKGROUND
Leap Arts in Education is a private nonprofit organization founded in 1979 in response to the severe cuts in California school budgets that effectively eliminated the arts from elementary education. Their mission is to provide top quality arts education programs that help students build skills to achieve their fullest potential.
Leap turned to Plinth to develop a new website does more than just provide information.
OBJECTIVES
- Develop a new website that draws new donors, teaching artists, and schools.
- Showcase Leap's classes and teaching artists.
- Ensure the website can be easily updated by Leap staff.
LEAP'S ORIGINAL WEBSITE
Leap's original website.
STRATEGY
- Build a firm foundation for Leap's brand by establishing their core values.
- Develop a website that can speak to donors and parents as well as educators.
- Design an icon system to visually represent how children benefit from each program.
- Communicate the connection between arts education combine statistics and quotes from inspirational leaders with photos of the classroom experience.
- Showcase Leap's world class teaching artists and innovative programs with individual pages.
establishing brand fundamentals
Leap's staff is filled with great people all working to make a difference in children's lives. Although each person can passionately speak to the importance of art in education and what Leap is about, we felt their current website fell short of communicating that effectively.
Distillation of Leap's core values.
Brand card exercise, defining what you are and aren't.
The first step in refreshing the Leap website was to distill the brand's core values. Establishing a set of focused core values gives purpose and inspiration to our design and copy.
COMMUNICATING HOW CHILDREN benefit FROM ARTS education
A key part of our strategy was to communicate how art classes like dance, music, and theater teach children important skills that may not be obvious to non-educators.
"We developed a system of icons to be used throughout the website so that people are constantly seeing the benefits each program and class provides."
- Andre Sibayan, Plinth Creative Director
VERBal strategy: equate arts education with academic success, intelligence, and a better world
The copy on Leap's new website needed to appeal to potential supporters including: educators, parents, business leaders, and government officials.
Our strategy was to use quotes from recognized organizations and influential people to communicate the importance of arts in education.
Leap's New website: finding the right mix of illustration, photography, and copy
Leap's new website is designed for people to scroll though the information to take advantage of the fact that most people today access the web on mobile devices and tablets.
For the first section of the home page, we immediately wanted to equate arts with academic achievement so we used this quote:
"STUDENTS INVOLVED WITH ARTS ARE 400% MORE LIKELY TO BE RECOGNIZED FOR ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT."
- Americans For The Arts
Top of Leap's new website.
The next section users encounter scrolling is the Programs section. How do you instantly communicate the relationship between the creativity and intelligence? We quoted Einstein:
"CREATIVITY IS INTELLIGENCE HAVING FUN."
- Albert Einstein
Middle section of Leap's new website.
The final section of the homepage contains 3 distinct ways to make a difference. After we used quotes to link arts education to intelligence and academic achievement, we used this quote to show how arts education builds a better future:
"ARTS EDUCATION IS ESSENTIAL FOR BUILDING INNOVATIVE THINKERS WHO WILL BE OUR NATION'S LEADERS OF TOMORROW."
- Michelle Obama
Bottom section of Leap's new website.
EASE OF USE
We built the the new Leap website on the Squarespace platform. We chose Squarespace because photos, copy, and basic content changes could be easily done with minor training. See the new Leaparts.com
Leap does inspiring work, with branding and strategic design, they have a website that shows how great they are.
Can you say the same about your company? If not...
