A Trusted Partner.

Helping organizations and government agencies that deal with special needs, disabilities and the homeless is a thankless job, and requires complete focus.

It was important for Technical Assistance Collaborative (whose core mission focuses at the intersection of affordable housing, health care, and human services policy and systems development) to find a trusted partner that could understand their business, realize their unique challenges, and come up with timely (and scalable) solutions.

TAC called on Massachusetts Technology Corporation to lead the task of relaunching, rebranding and recreating their external digital and non-digital assetts and to help them be more consistent in the use of logos, colors, fonts and styles.

MTC and our partners worked with TAC on the following full-service deliverables:

• Targeting and Role Analysis
• Logo Design
• Stylebooks and Color Palettes
• Identity
• Content Inventory
• Wireframes
• Mockups
• Visual Assets
• Creative
• jQuery
• CMS Integration
• Launch
• SEO Strategy & Mentoring

Identity, Stylebooks and Logo Design.

MTC worked with a trusted local partner (Leland Creative) to design a new logo for TAC, create letterhead, new business cards, whitepaper templates, and Powerpoint skins. Most importantly, to emphasize consistency and a unified look, we created a stylebook that was distributed to all TAC employees on proper logo usage, fonts, appropriate colors in collateral and digital assetts.

The stylebook and launch of the new branding was created in less than 60 days and delivered to TAC for immediate implementation by the team.

Disjoined is an Understatement.

TAC's existing website, while having significant and relevant content was disjoined. It was difficult for their non-technical editors to update content, it wasn't mobile friendly, and there was no consistency in styles and the user experience didn't bring the reader to where they needed to be.

One of the first things we did with TAC is perform our proprietary Role and Content Analysis. Through interviews and deep analysis, we helped TAC determine who visited their digital assets. Who are they? What drives them? What are their main demographics and characteristics? What are those users' goals were when visiting, and as importantly, what are our goals for them?

Understanding the difference in a user's goals and our goals for them ensures we drive content to the right audience at the right time.

Understand the Content Architecture.

One of the driving characteristics for Technical Assistance Collaborative is they're a well-respected and key source of knowledge in integrated supportive housing and other related issues. But their existing website didn't highlight this. Even though it contained outstanding content, it was difficult for users to find the right articles, white papers, publications and knowledge areas quickly and easily.

So the first thing we did was to understand the content involved and to take an inventory of their current database.

Mega-content, Mega-menus.

With a plethora of content, it's hard enough to determine what the links on a menu bar should be. This is where a mega-menu comes in handy. Sections of a site are easily navigated to without having to manually drill through page after page. The mega-menus we designed for TAC formed a site outline, easily reached after first arriving on the home page, or while browsing any other page on the site.

And better yet, it doesn't hide anything already being viewed...using jQuery techniques, it simply pushes it down. Try it out, you'll like it. 

However, mega-menus aren't only for links. We also implemented functional search boxes, buttons, and dropdowns for the more robust areas of TAC's website. Revisiting the site and have a particular voucher you are looking for? Just use the dropdown menu. Or maybe you have a particular publication in mind. Just use that dropdown. Once again, we made it easy to navigate through the site, from any page.

And as a nonprofit dealing specifically with individuals with special needs, it was vitally important the TAC site be fully readable by JAWS readers or other devices designed for the visually impaired. After launch the TAC site was audited for compliance and passed with flying colors.

Umbraco Content Management System.

So what if I need to make a change? No problem. TAC was developed through Umbraco, an extremely powerful and user-friendly content management system. Users have the ability to:

• Edit templates
• Edit content such as text and images
• Add and remove pages
• Organize site structure
• Create news items
• Upload documents

And on top of all this, it's easy. Once logged in to your personal CMS, your site map is available to you via your dashboard.

Click on a page, and a number of editing options become available. Umbraco allows you to keep your site dynamic and fresh. 

Analyze the Analytics.

A great site is meaningless if the right visitors don't visit the site at the right time. While we always take search engine optimization into account when designing the tecnical and content architecture of a site, we installed Google Analytics so we can measure successes (and failures) and be able to make immediate adjustments.

Google Analytics provides visual analysis and reporting of the site's visits and usage. What state or country are visitors coming from? Where on the page are they clicking? What's their path through the site? What devices are they using? What pages are they leaving from?

We meet with TAC every month to discuss the status of their site and help break down these reports.