Foundation for Madison Public Schools
As the major fundraising and grant-making body supporting public schools in Madison, the Foundation for Madison's Public Schools needed a website that would not only encourage donations but also organize their complex suite of giving opportunities.
CHALLENGE
Provide a digital platform that supports giving to enhance student experience and education in Madison's public schools.
The Foundation for Madison’s Public Schools (FMPS) serves the school district, teachers, and families by helping raise and distribute funds to meet student needs and provide support for new opportunities. When they came to Earthling their online giving platform was falling short—preventing donors from giving to their full capacity and limiting programs from taking full advantage of modern fundraising exercises like online and social campaigns. In addition, foundation staff were burdened with manual administration of funds and a clunky and unattractive interface.
The Foundation for Madison’s Public Schools (FMPS) was looking for a partner to help vision and build an online environment that would:
- Support a donation process that would make it both enticing and easy for donors to give online.
- Integrate with third-party software to manage donor data, grant applications, and event registration.
- Reflect the professional and compassionate mission of the organization.
SOLUTION
A powerful and attractive site that completely transformed the ability of schools and parent groups to initiate and promote funding opportunities for school programs.
Because FMPS supports funding for a fairly large range of activities from creative spaces in classrooms to science innovation, we worked carefully to organize giving channels and streamline program descriptions. In addition to a greatly enhanced giving platform, the new FMPS site incorporates a number of features that have dramatically improved their site's functionality:
- Responsive design for mobile environments
- Scroll-based, intuitive navigation
- An easy to use yet powerful web content editor for staff to update (WordPress)
- Support for embedded media including videos and photo galleries
- Easily searchable donation function and prominent ability to give on every page
- Site hosting and security
- Social media integration (share buttons, follow buttons, etc.)
- Email update sign-up
RESULTS
FMPS is better able to connect individual schools and programs with donors looking to support them.
Foundation for Madison Public Schools is using their website to reach out to the community with a much more powerful story about the positive impact they are having on the lives of Madison schoolchildren as well as a dramatically improved mechanism for community members to join them in supporting public schools through donations. With a the new easy-to-manage platform, site managers are better able to keep site content up-to-date and support outreach through other channels such as social media and e-news subscriptions.
