Rainbow PonyCake treats MN Senior Corps

By day, they’re interactive pros at Catalyst Studios but otherwise known (at The Nerdery Overnight Website Challenge) as Rainbow PonyCake. Check out their work for MN Senior Corps.

MN Senior Corps & Rainbow Pony Cake from The Nerdery on Vimeo.

Said Catalyst Studios founder Jason Rysavy:

“MN Senior Corps connects thousands of seniors to volunteer opportunities across the state’s 4000+ partner locations. Their old website had very general information about the program and then a number to call or a form to fill out for more info. A Senior Corps employee would then find out which county they were hoping to volunteer in and connect them with the right person. It was a huge headache for them and the user.

“MN Senior Corps had some ideas on how to make this simple, but we took it a significant step forward. The main idea we brought to them was doing some geolocation to automatically find out which county a site visitor was in, bypassing any manual county look up or searching. Our thought was simple. We can figure out where they are…so let’s save a step and tell them. Once we all knew that was going to solve the main issue MN Senior Corps was having, we looked for other hopes and dreams they had. We found that they had tons of great volunteer stories from seniors across the state, from every county. We learned that they had nowhere to display these stories. So we created a tool to add stories to the site and admin tools to select stories to approve for public viewing on the site…giving them the option to randomly display them across the site, or let them set specific stories on specific pages.

“In the design process, we also gave them a new identity. We also came up with a tagline and wrote nearly all the copy for the site. Overall, the design is all about ease of use, cutting down barriers and engaging a less tech-savvy population.”