Responses by Base

Background: The site is an integral part of the International Fund for Animal Welfare’s (IFAW) rebrand and 50th anniversary campaign. We created a brand strategy that targets a new audience—millennials—who respond more to immersive, bite-sized pieces of information paired with calls to action. Our goal was to emotionally engage the audience through verbal and visual storytelling, enabling visitors to become participants in a mission together with IFAW instead of simply helping IFAW do its work. The site disrupts the entire conservation/environmental category by showing how IFAW’s experts work in the field, challenging the standard codes of beauty shots of animals in the wild—and guilt-inducing pleas for help.

Design core: We created “supertags,” which show users IFAW’s unique methodology at a glance and link content—article to project, project to news item—in unexpected yet meaningful ways. This enabled us to contextualize the important work that IFAW does without overloading users with information or resorting to complex scientific explanations.

Favorite details: The website has a system of smart modules on each page, personalized for every visitor to the site. Additionally these modules know if a user has signed up for a newsletter, petition or to donate, and they automatically suggest a follow-up action to maximize impact.

Navigation structure: Simplicity of experience was essential. The site uses innovative navigation features—which took us a while to get just right—to make them feel easy, obvious and natural. In addition to the standard navigation panel, the supertags help users navigate the site in a horizontal rather than vertical manner.

Technology: We built the site using a custom CMS with a very elaborate publishing workflow. Administrators can publish modular content across ten geographic instances in five languages in a matter of minutes.