Nonprofit Design/Tech

Discover Thyself is a "discernment" site for Quaker teens. Sponsored by Earlham College, it features resources, videos and the all-new "Discer-o-Matic Quiz."

The design is all original. We went through six rounds of the concept design mockups made up on Adobe Fireworks. Because the site is built on WordPress used as a CMS, Earlham College staff was able to add and arrange content even before the design coding began. The site uses the excellent Thematic theme, a blank template that allows for quite sophisticated designs using Action Hooks and complete CSS markup.

The most exciting element of the site is the "Discern-o-Matic" quiz, which takes users through a series of questions. At the end the questions are reorganized and presented to the user to help them understand what it is they want to do. The quiz is powered using the open-source LimeSurvey. Results are outputted via a custom PHP script that polls the LimeSurvey database and outputs in a nicely-worded and formatted WordPress results page. The templates for Lime Survey were altered to mimick the look of the rest of the site; the average user won't notice the pass-off from WordPress to Lime Survey and back to WordPress.

In hopes the quiz might go viral, individual results are saved on a unique URL. Users are invited to share their results page via Facebook.

Visit Site: http://www.discoverthyself.org

ReconRabbi is a social network for rabbis associated with the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. It is designed to provide ongoing education and networking for far-flung alumni.

It's a highly customized, member-only site built on the Ning platform. The typical Ning features are here: video, podcasts and member profiles. Expanded areas include extensive training material for members. We recorded and I edited a series of eight screencasts of approximately five minutes each for their Help section using Screenflow for Mac; topics include signing up, adding discussions, using the customized training material.

Member-only Site: http://www.reconrabbi.net/.

The Friends World Committee for Consultation unites Quakers of all stripes together in joint projects and dialog. It's Americas office has the most complete listing of U.S. and Canadian Friends Meetings and Churches and now has a map to prove it! This is a mash-up of the FWCC database with Google Maps.

Because of limitations of how many data points Google can show the countries have been divided into regions. The main access page is a screen shot of a Google Map with a old fashioned imagemap overlay that allows you to select the region you want to look at. Javascript goodness shadows the currently selected region.

See it live: www.fwccamericas.org/friends

I was hired to redesign the website of a cemetery that represents a fascinating slice of South Jersey history. In the 1880s, a group of Jews escaped Russian pogroms, came to America and started a "return to the soil" movement that led to the establishment of an agricultural colony in the small Salem County crossroads of Norma, New Jersey. Before long they established Alliance Cemetery.

The new Alliance website highlights the entrance gate. The cemetery has hired a surveying company to do a detailed map of the plots and we hope to add this in with a Google Maps mash-up when the data becomes available. A detailed history and photos are also in the works.

The design is hand-coded from scratch and is probably the most tasteful design of my portfolio. The pages themselves are editable by the client using CushyCMS and the Directions page has an integrated Google Map.

Visit: AllianceCemetery.com

Ginny Christensen is the force behind Strategy for Growth, LLC, a Wyncote, PA consulting firm that provides strategic planning, board development, executive coaching, and leadership team development for independent schools and nonprofits. The site is fairly simple. It's built in WordPress and has rudimentary e-commerce with a Paypal option for purchasing books.

Visit: StrategyForGrowth.com

This Quaker meeting sits along Philadelphia's Main Line suburbs and is making special efforts at outreach. They wanted a design refresh that would allow the heads of committees direct access to their section of the websites. With multiple log-ins and high content needs, we went with the Drupal content management system, which has become the CMS of choice for many non-profits.

The design is built from scratch with obvious nods to the Facebook look-and-feel: we wanted something that would seem both familiar and fresh to the young professional crowd that is this meeting's most obvious target audience.

Visit: Haverfordfriendsmeeting.org

This is a Ning-based social network for Friends Council on Education, a Quaker organization dedicated to supporting Friends Schools across a very wide geographic area. I set the site up and did initial training. The members-only site now boasts over 700 members and dozens of member-uploaded videos and photos.

The mission of the Salem County Special Services School District, a regional educational service agency, is to provide high quality, cost-effective programs and services to the schools and districts of Salem County and Cumberland County, New Jersey. This site built with what are for me fairly generic tools: Movable Type as CMS, with Flickr intergration. The design style sheet was built from scratch using CSS.

Visit: Scsssd.org