Website: Covenant House

Covenant House Website Redesign
Covenant House
Submitted by Sanky Communications

In our first year of honoring website design and its part in fundraising, the standout entry was a redesign effort on the Covenant House site.

The new homepage is beautifully streamlined, doing away with what was a messy array of buttons and links and replacing them with strong imagery depicting actual homeless kids who were rescued and helped by Covenant House — and three immediate choices: “Get Help,” “Give Now” and “Our Kids.” The new site also includes a powerful twist on the traditional “locations” map that builds a map of the U.S. out of photographs that keep the message of urgency going even in what could be considered dead space. Everything was updated with more close-up shots quite literally representing the faces of need, which carries over to the donation page. The overall look is gritty and moving.

Behind the scenes, the site was developed for custom donation processing, tracking and site analytics. It also added special features including a shopping cart platform for the online gift catalog, allowing donors to purchase tangible items and services for the youths. It also has proved to be the organization’s most effective site for fundraising to date.