District 202, renewed
Heading into the Overnight Website Challenge, District 202 needed a game-changer. After 17 years, the GLBT youth-serving nonprofit org was boldly leaving its long-leased but costly and under-utilized physical space for the more-portable, much-roomier and free Internet – a strategic online move of necessity.
“Without the Overnight Web Challenge and intensely hard work of Team Praxis, we would have been looking at shutting this organization by the end of the year,” said Curt Prins, board chair of District 202. “The web site overhaul has allowed us to start overhauling our organization. It helped us become smaller in order for us to become bigger.” (Old site, above; new site, below.)
When asked what was so wrong with District 202’s old website, Prins said: “Basically everything. It was hard to update. Hard on the eyes…”
Team Praxis, comprised of volunteer interactive pros from Colle+McVoy and The Nerdery, came ready with some pre-baked homework. “Although we did not know which nonprofit we were going to get beforehand, we were allowed to plan and build whatever we wanted and bring it with us. So what I did was prepare a base ExpressionEngine install,” said The Nerdery’s Brian Litzinger in an interview posted on ExpressionEngine.com (see Brian’s entire interview here).
“In 24 hours we designed and architected the site, built a chat application from scratch, integrated with a third party CRM/donation tool, and created a Ning community,” said Litzinger. “I knew that the way ExpressionEngine handles different content types – through the usage of Weblogs and custom fields – it would handle whatever we threw at it. It handled static pages, news feed, and generated all the XML for the Flash modules. Pretty much every word on the site is editable through ExpressionEngine, which will make it easy for the client to update.”
“With this transformation, we wish to reemerge as a youth inspired, tech savvy, streamlined and more powerful organization which keeps creating new ways for youth to bring their unique voice and leadership to our ever-changing world,” wrote Prins in an open letter to District 202 constituents. And while his District 202 colleagues Jason and Solomon made it through the all-nighter, Prins described his shuteye as one of the most enjoyable 90-minute naps on concrete ever taken.
While all volunteers at the Overnight Website Challenge deserve credit for their nerdy deeds, it’s worth repeating here that the panel of judges gave the work of Praxis top honors. “We come away from this year’s event with a trophy, yes, but also humbled at the awesomeness of Minneapolis’ web development and nonprofit communities,” said Praxis team captain/Colle+McVoy Technology Lead Jason Striegel. “We’re honored to work with District 202 in launching their new site, and appreciate Sierra Bravo’s leadership in making this event happen.”
“District 202 headed into this crazy all-nighter hoping to get a better looking website that our youth could easily update,” said Prins. “What we got instead was a visually impressive, easy-to-manage tool allowing us to evolve from a bricks-and mortar nonprofit into an Internet-driven organization empowering GLBT youth. It’s the greatest donation we’ve received in our 17 years.”
See for yourself at http://www.dist202.org/.
