For more than a half century, Common Cause has upheld the core values of American democracy through its policy and legal work and the backing of 1.5 million members.
To counter multi-pronged attacks on democracy during the 2024 presidential election cycle, Common Cause needed to rally its vast network. But the existing website didn’t make it easy or exciting to get involved.
Common Cause aspired to an action-oriented site that asserted its nonpartisan credibility and celebrated its tangible impact.
It also set bolder goals: The project would include redesigned sites for its 25 chapters, all with automated, full-site translation and cross-site content publishing.
Actions, impact, and priorities
In-depth user interviews with real Common Cause audiences revealed that they wanted to personally defend democracy. Even though the organization offers many ways to contribute, the opportunities were difficult to find. Based on this discovery, the team set a north star: clear user journeys to petitioning, donating, volunteer training, and more actions.
Audiences also divulged a sense of hopelessness. The new site seeks to re-invigorate them by celebrating major victories and showcasing priority projects.
Local stories, reduced admin effort
Chapter leaders are on the ground, side-by-side with members to lobby at state capitals, hold rallies, and form coalitions, and they don’t always have much time to spend on website updates.
We gave them a scalable platform that beautifully supports a spectrum of content generation, from just the basics to a robust editorial calendar. We also made it easy to tap into content created on other sites in the Common Cause network. Our syndication solution allows administrators to re-publish posts from the national site and other chapters. Because state sites tell a local story, we augmented the system with editing permissions to customize their own version.
Teal were invaluable partners throughout a complicated rebuild of our entire federated network of sites—helping us to figure out precisely what we were looking for, guiding us through the most important & difficult strategic decisions, and struck a perfect balance of letting us steer the ship while pushing back when it was in our best interest.
The team is professional, constructive, and clearly know their stuff on everything that goes into designing, developing, and building internal consensus for a project like this. Everyone we worked with put real effort into understanding our particular needs as an organization, which helped us deliver a final product we're thrilled with—very highly recommended!
Jack Mumby
Digital Director
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Year of Completion
2024
Issues
Services
Project Team
Teal Media is a woman-led creative agency that builds brands and websites for nonprofits, foundations, and mission-driven organizations. We have a core presence in Washington, DC and Detroit, MI.
