Casa of St. Louis
Connecting volunteers through a comprehensive, secure portal.
- Design
- Mobile & Desktop Development
- User Experience
- Workflow Consolidation
The Challenge
When the Manager of Volunteer Engagement at St. Louis’ CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates for Children) reached out to one of our design agency partners to build a secure, online portal for their volunteers and staff members, Kestrel was their first suggestion to tackle the project.
With their public-facing site built on a less robust platform than is ideal for password-protected content, we knew this was an opportunity to shift them toward a WordPress site, which offers a wide variety of functional customization through their open source library of plug-ins.
Project Goals
Improve Volunteer Engagement
Provide Centralized Area for Volunteers to Get Information
Refresh Look, but Maintain National Brand Guidelines
Aside from providing a communications platform for CASA’s volunteers, it was also important to create a simple and helpful interface for the staff who would be managing the platform – from uploading a new volunteer list, to adding and editing the various custom post types.
Staying true to Kestrel’s goal to continuously be a resourceful partner in the evolution of the websites we built for CASA, we made an easily accessible WordPress Training Guide page with a variety of how-tos for the administrators to quickly access. This resource will live on through any changes in regard to website management, and allows us to add new reference content anytime we implement new functionality or a common question comes up.
Our Solution
One of the unique challenges that a portal presents is getting user permissions and member roles in place, seamlessly uploading each user’s profile information and having a plan for keeping that information up-to-date with other internal systems.
With strong collaboration between our developer, project director and the client team, plus a little help from BuddyPress and WordPress’ native customization features for users, we were golden. The experience for the front-end users (participants) of the portal was just as clean and useful as it was for the back-end users (administrators).
