The Wild Center is a natural history museum located in the Adirondacks that is committed to a future where people and the natural world thrive together.
In lieu of their 20th anniversary, The Wild Center is currently in the process of launching a capital campaign that serves to:
GROW: Build towards a new era of impact
STRENGTHEN: Power the people and programs that change lives
SUSTAIN: Prepare for the future with a lasting endowment
For our senior capstone, we are partnering with The Wild Center to answer the question: how can one can use digital tools to progress a fundraising campaign? Our group has come up with five deliverables to address the campaign’s needs:
Campaign Website
Our first and most important deliverable is a website that hosts specifically campaign information & donations. It acts as a landing page seperate from The Wild Center’s main website where the campaign’s goals are described in depth, donors are funneled into internal channels, and people can ask questions while being updated on the campaign’s progress. This website also serves to track engagement from visitors and be easily editable by The Wild Center’s staff to update information as donor goals get met.
Brand Guide
When discussing the branding and design of the new website, our team found that the internal branding guidelines of The Wild Center outdated and vague. During our first visit to the center in the Fall, The Wild Center staff agreed, and expressed interest in a redesign and refresh. Thus, our team created an updated brand guide for The Wild Center to help achieve consistency between their platforms.
3D Model
To help donors further recognize the impact of acheiving campaign goals, our team incorporated a 3D rendering of the new boathouse. Not only will website visitors be able interact with the model online by moving it around to explore the ammenities it will have, but in meetings with donors The Wild Center will be able to put it in a VR headset, allowing those donors to walk around the structure and better understand the unique experiences this new building will bring.
Social Media Templates
To aid in the marketing of the campaign beyond in-person materials and hosted websites, our group created social media templates for The Wild Center to use to highlight important dates, events, and animal news. These templates act as foundational designs to make posts for the campaign look cleaner, more cohesive, and easy for viewers to distinctly recognize from The Wild Center’s other social media posts.
Physical Media
Lastly, as a way to incorporate donation opportunites in-person at The Wild Center, we designed TipTap signage and gift shop items whose proceeds would go directly to campaign funding.
Results
As The Wild Center is still in the quiet phase of its capital campaign, our work mainly serves as a backlog of resources to hand off to The Wild Center for future use. Some deliverables have immediate results such as the updated brand guide, with which we were able to implement the new, accessible colors throughout all of our deliverables and will begin to be used by The Wild Center’s staff. For other things such as the website, we have prepared polished pages ready to be released when the time is right along with blank templates for the staff to use to make updates.
This project gave us the opportunity to create products using our individual skill sets that all supported the goal of advancing the new campaign. Through weekly meetings with each other and communication with The Wild Center, we identified needs that could be solved with digital tools and worked on its solutions. By having a clear idea of our individual responsibilities, we were able to make consistent progress throughout the two semesters. Working on The Wild Center campaign was a great opportunity to improve our technical and communication skills that we are all grateful for.
