Discount Foundation

Discount Foundation is a small foundation that makes a big difference in people's lives: they invest in community organizing groups who to empower poor urban residents to improve their communities, living conditions and economic opportunities.

For many years the Foundation had a very basic and static website. It served the purpose of explaining their mission and letting people know how to contact them. However, it did not do a great job of highlighting the important successes of which they'd been a part.

Goal: Celebrate the grantees and their successes.

Any foundation is a critical piece of its grantees' success, and could certainly take some credit. But Discount wanted to put the spotlight on the folks on the ground who are doing the legwork. The new homepage sports a bright slideshow that cycles through photos of the grantees in action.

Out of the four main menu items, two of them pertain to the grants and grantees. In the "grants" section, visitors can see a full list of the most recent award cycle. Or, if they want to dig deeper, they can use the advanced filters to search for grants by issue, state, or year.

In the "featured grantees" section, one grantee organization has been chosen to represent each one of the issues that the Foundation supports. That grantee gets a full page, with several pictures, quotations, a description of their work, and a link to their website.

Goal: A venue for sharing relevant news and reports.

The Foundation staff often runs across news and reports that are related to their work. Their old website was not easily updated, so none of this information got posted. The staff is not active on Facebook or Twitter, so that wasn't a good way to share it either.

The new website has a "news and reports" section dedicated to this purpose. Anything that's posted will automatically be listed in reverse-chronological order (newest items first). In the near future, these lists will also be segmented by issue.

Goal: Don't be a navel-gazer, focus on the audience.

The new Discount Foundation site is an excellent example of an audience-centric site. It doesn't tout itself, but rather focuses on the issues at hand. It doesn't seek to persuade you, but rather presents its wealth of information in an engaging way and lets you be the judge. Take a peek!