The Hunger Project

What I love so much about this website design is that it’s bright and cheerful. It really conveys a sense of hope and inspiration, even though The Hunger Project’s work deals with a lot of serious (and not always happy!) situations. But the feeling of optimism is key to their success. They focus on fixing the broken systems, and on empowering women and men to meet their own needs even when so many forces are working against them.

One big piece of creating this positive feeling is all of the great photos The Hunger Project has used on their site. In particular, they use a lot of close-up photos of people’s faces – this creates a feeling of personal connection, and really draws the visitors into the site. What’s more, most of the people look really happy! And of course it makes us feel good when we see so many smiles.

The Drupal site was launched in September 2008. We’ve been working with THP to add new features to the site periodically since then. A couple of our favorites:

E-Postcards

As a clever way for existing supporters to spread the word to their friends, The Hunger Project offered electronic postcards to honor birthdays, the winter holidays, and more. They announced the availability of the postcards to their network via email, Facebook and Twitter. Anyone who wanted to send a postcard could easily come to www.thp.org/epostcards, select a design, and fill in a custom message for the recipient. And then the recipient could (optionally) click through to the THP website to learn more.

How’d we do it? We used Drupal’s webform module to collect the sender’s and recipient’s information, and then customized the webform HTML email output so that the recipient receives a pretty email with a note directly from the sender.

Blog

The Hunger Project’s communications staff had a great plan in place for writing and releasing regular blog posts. They had also already done most of the legwork for building relationships with other bloggers, and developing an audience. What they needed was a way to bring all of this together at www.thp.org/blog.

We designed a slightly different site header to set the blog section apart from the rest of the site. Then, through CSS we set it up so that any page in the blog section would use the green header rather than the standard blue one. 

We also set up an attractive block at the bottom of each post that shows the author’s photo and bio, as well as a full bio page for each author that lists his/her posts below in reverse-chronological order.