Building a New Website for a California Animal Rescue Group
The Challenge
Camp Cocker Rescue, based in Los Angeles CA, has been rescuing high-needs Cocker Spaniels since 2007, providing medical treatment and finding new homes through a robust and careful adoption program.
Like so many small nonprofit organizations powered by a dedicated founder and a team of volunteers, Camp Cocker had a DIY website, built using Squarespace, that had exploded to over 1,000 separate URLs and the number of dogs rescued and adopted grew year after year.
Maintaining the website was time consuming and manual. There were many upgrades that the team wanted to make but couldn’t because of the time investment, or lack of functionality on the aging Squarespace website. It was clearly time for a new, more efficient and sustainable system!
Founder Cathy Stanley approached Lauren Atherton of HeartSpark Design for a new brand and website project, and Lauren contracted with me to bring her designs to life.
Working with Ed at Blue Hills Digital was such an easy experience, and we are so pleased with our new website! He served as a creative partner, helping us think about ways to better organize our website, saving us time and offering a far smoother experience for our visitors who are considering adopting one of our dogs. Now we have an amazing new tool that allows us to quickly set up a profile for each new dog that joins Camp Cocker, and with a few clicks of a we can button post updates to their profile, update their status, and move them into the Rescue Yearbook when they are adopted. No more copying and pasting and juggling a million separate pages! We’re looking forward to working with Ed on new features in the future!
Cathy Stanley, Founder, Camp Cocker Rescue
Our Process
We started our process with a detailed content audit of the existing website, which uncovered over 1,000 individual URLs, including duplicate pages for many of the dogs. We spent time reviewing user journeys for the new website, and breaking down all the data about each dog that needs to be shared.
We decided to develop a custom content type for the new WordPress site to power the dog profiles, with a set of custom fields to mirror the internal database that Camp Cocker maintains as dogs arrive, are listed for adoption, and are eventually adopted. The new dog profile content type in turn powers multiple different pages on the new website, allowing us to display listings of dogs with different statuses.
In the past, the Camp Cocker team would manually create a Squarespace page for each dog. When a dog was adopted, they would create a second, separate page for that dog in the “Rescue Yearbook” section of the website.
Now, when a dog’s profile status is changed from Available for Adoption to Adopted, the fields displayed on the dog’s profile are updated automatically and the profile is removed from the Available Dogs page and added to the relevant year in the Rescue Yearbook.
To manage the time-consuming process of migrating dog profile information for hundreds of dogs, I built a workflow that automated as much of the data migration as possible, pulling updated profiles from the Camp Cocker team’s Airtable base into WordPress.
The website also includes a Resource Library that with search and filter-by-category options, and a robust integration with FundraiseUp for online giving.
Now that the new website is live, we are discussing more improvements to streamline the dog adoption process even more, with the goal of freeing up more volunteer hours from administrative work to focus on caring for the “campers” and raising more funds to expand the organization’s work.
Results
Before:
After:
