Yellowstone Park Foundation

The Yellowstone Park Foundation (YPF) works in cooperation with the National Park Service to fund projects and programs that protect, preserve, and enhance the natural and cultural resources and the visitor experience of Yellowstone National Park. YPF receives no annual government funding; it relies instead upon the generous support of private citizens, foundations, and corporations to ensure that Yellowstone's great gifts to the world will never diminish. Since its inception in 1996, the Yellowstone Park Foundation has successfully funded more than 200 conservation, research, and education projects in Yellowstone.

Knowing their site design was outdated, stagnant and their navigation wasn’t intuitive to showcasing all the initiatives YPF wanted their audience to see, YPF forged ahead on a site architecture and redesign project to organize their online presence with their audience’s expectations.

Project Goals

• Give website users easier access to information on what is going on currently in Yellowstone
• Make it easy to refresh website information more frequently
• Improve site navigation which leads to increased conversion rates
• Grow email housefile and donor base to support the Park
• Get the most out of Convio constituent management software investment for online fundraising and donor engagement

Services Provided

• Site Architecture Design
• Website Design
• Design Implementation

Results

• YPF main site goal is being met! Increased traffic significantly increased to their “What We Do”pages, making their initiatives the most visited pages outside of the home page.
• Increased average time per visit by 50% and increased pages per visit by 20%.
• Registration on the site has been higher than previous year’s thanks to easy-to-find registration and highlighting fun, but housefile-building-oriented, e-card campaigns and social media.
• Donations for their wolf collar campaign are up almost 50% due to the coupling of a great email marketing strategy and an intuitive site that guides donors quickly and efficiently through the donation process.
• Within the first few months of launching the site, bounce rates decreased 12% meaning YPF was keeping their audience engaged and clicking through more content from the home page.

Case Study Conclusions

• Take the time to understand what your audience goals are so you are taking them into account when setting your organization’s online goals.
• Use research tools to understand trends within your site so you make smart choices when reorganizing and rewriting for your site refresh. It’s important to understand what site visitors want and align that with your organization’s wants.
• Spend time with your content! You need to take the time to review ALL the content on your site so your content is on par with your goals and visitor expectations of the site.
• Content should express your goals, coerce site visitors to read more and do more on your site. Graphics are pretty, but not the most important piece to an effective website.
• Make your site fresh and engaging by keeping important and time-sensitive content updated and highlighted on your home page. It will give first-time visitors the spark to connect with you and give ongoing visitors a reason to come back for more.
• Allow your audience to interact with you. Don’t forget to keep your social media links and registration in a consistent spot on your site.
• Don’t get overwhelmed! Seek out a firm that can put a realistic timeline and approach to your redesign project by incorporating best practices about site architecture, content and design while keeping a keen eye on ensuring everything will be easily maintained by you and your staff.