Design study · Community action agency · Georgia
All together one: real help, found fast
A redesign concept for a community action agency, where the visitor is frequently in crisis and every extra navigation step is a real cost.
Concept only, built with sample data. Facts come from the agency's published site; this is not the official Action Pact website.
- Nonprofit website design
- Forgiving search
- Program intake
- Donation path
- Accessibility audit
Action Pact — open the working site
Case study overview
The problem
Community action agencies run many unrelated programs — utility assistance, Head Start, housing, aging services — under funding streams with their own names and eligibility rules. Someone who needs help does not know the program names. They know their situation, they are often stressed, and they may be searching on a phone with limited data. A menu of program acronyms fails them at precisely the moment the agency exists to help.
The approach
The front door is a forgiving, search-first find-help-fast desk covering every program, where a resident can search or simply ask in plain words and get sourced answers — forgiving because misspellings and colloquial phrasing are the norm, not the exception, for someone in a hurry. Behind it sits an accessible plain-language application intake that routes by program and office rather than making the resident work out which office handles what. A live donation path shows where a gift goes, and a cross-channel feed pulls news and events from Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and the calendar so the site stays current without a separate publishing chore. An honest before-and-after WCAG 2.1 AA audit of the live site is published alongside.
The result
Ten routes with a search-first help desk, a routed program application, a donation path with a where-your-gift-goes breakdown, and a documented accessibility comparison, in a warm gold and teal world built on the agency's real brand.
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