In the late spring of this year TELUS came to us with the request to completely revamp their Community website. The existing site was hard to navigate and important information about TELUS community involvement, programs and donations were not being showcased well at all. Not that it was the fault of the site’s design per say, but rather the business objectives and content had changed substantially since the last major overhaul. TELUS is much more active in the community and funds hundreds of community programs across Canada as well as emergency relief in places like Haiti and Pakistan. In fact they were named Most Outstanding Philanthropic Corporationglobally this year. With that kind of commitment to giving they needed a site to both showcase the programs but to also give charities easier access to applying for the funding. Our goal was to achieve both objectives while updating the branding that the site had not kept pace with.

Our team completely re-wired the information architecture into four main sections. 1) Philosophy, 2) Community Investment, 3) Team TELUS Cares, and 4)Funding Application form. Prior to our design, new sections would get “bolted on” in odd locations because the site’s architecture was not designed to capture the community program holistically. With the four new global sections we knew that all current and future content would be able to find a logical home in the site that was not be a force fit.

One of the key problems of the existing site was that there were all of these great programs being funded by TELUS that was not being percolated to the top or home page for users to see….well there was no real home page in the last design to begin with to be honest. The new homepage now has a large current events carousel that showcases big projects and initiatives very clearly and in the well known TELUS brand of large images, short headlines and summary copy. The cool part of the carousel is the hidden funding map that is just behind the large revolving slides. When you click the Funding Map button an interactive Google map is takes center stage on the homepage and a showcase of TELUS community projects from coast to coast is revealed. Users can quickly browse the projects and then click into the bigger story right from the map. Site users no longer have to root through many levels to dig into the funding showcases.

The four sections of the new site are now more logical and will always be able to absorb new content organically. There were two main areas that were not showcasing the way TELUS funds programs. Both the Community Boards and TELUS Ambassadors were not only buried but were just giant dumps of heavy copy that users would have to wade through. Each Community Board and local Ambassadors group were given there own landing and project pages. Now each team could showcase the project with text and images. There was substantial weight added to presence that they had on the site. Both of these groups really are on the front lines when it comes to actively working with either local community funding or in the case of the TELUS Ambassadors working directly as volunteers.

The other main goal for the new site design was to give community groups and charities easier access to TELUS funding for projects. A new prominent global driver was added to the site so that no matter where the site user was they always had a quick way to apply for funding. We also changed the funding pages to be a stepped process so that applicants would have to walk through a gated pre-application area. This was done to reduce the error rate in funding applications. The old site design let applicants jump right to the application form bypassing the funding guidelines resulting in a large number of errors in the application process. The new design looks to reduce this substantially.

The biggest challenge for us with the Community site as the fact that it was not on a content management system and all 400+ pages [ 200+ English and 200+ French] needed to be delivered in flat html….we utilized a Ruby on Rails compiler and some markdown to make the process a little easier, non the less it was quite the Herculaneum effort for the dev team.

This is not a dump and run exercise either for the site. Our team is moving right into phase II and ongoing site updates. We are assisting TELUS in a content program that will help them manage all of the stakeholders to provide timely and important updates to the site, so that it will continue to grow and showcase the latest ways in which TELUS “Gives where it Lives”