Work
The Ian Potter
Foundation
Australian Design Awards Winner
The Ian Potter Foundation was awarded Silver in the Melbourne Design Awards 2022 for 'Digital - Community' category.
Excellence & Innovation
Visit SiteThe Ian Potter Foundation is a major Australian philanthropic foundation that supports and promotes excellence and innovation.
Based in Melbourne, the Foundation makes grants nationally to support charitable organisations working to benefit the community across a wide range of sectors and endeavours.
The Goal
The primary goal of the foundation is to support charitable organisations through the apt provision of grants and other entitlements.
As a part of their digital transformation strategy, The Ian Potter Foundation required a new responsive website that fully represented their 4 key brand pillars, using interactive content to increase stakeholder engagement and attract the highest quality grant applications.
In addition to attracting high-quality applicants, the site also needed to actively lead applicants towards the grants they were most qualified for, while screening out unqualified grant-seekers before they started an application.
Using a custom-built SilverStripe Multisite module, we enabled The Ian Potter Foundation to share assets and manage content across three different websites via one easy-to-use CMS. We also future-proofed the site to ensure security, flexibility, and scalability over the next 6 years.
The Solution
Working closely with The Ian Potter Foundation, we applied design-led thinking to craft a seamless and intuitive user experience that boldly highlighted and facilitated the 'Grant Application' process.
From the moment a user lands on site, they are immediately whisked away to the information they need. Applicant qualification starts from the top. A seamless mega nav solution, coupled with strong calls to action living within the banner of each page, sifting each visitor into the right applicant category.
Pages have integrated questionnaires that only show users relevant content depending on their responses. There is no need for visitors to sift through pages of content, blogs, FAQs, and more to find the information they require.
With the 4 Funding Pillars, we distilled a complex relationship between funding areas, rounds and managers into pages that directed visitors down the right path. Concurrently, softly qualifying grant-seekers well before they begin the application process.
With so many Grants (with extensive T&Cs) and often such little time to publish the content, the ability to easily publish and manage Grant-based content via the CMS was fundamental to the success of the project. Consequently, we constructed a dedicated Grants management interface (or "Grants Database") whereby all past, present and future Grants could be recorded and dynamically turned on (or off) within their respective funding round timeframe by website administrators.
Taking the above into account, Soul+Wolf was then able to merge and migrate The Ian Potter Moving Image Commission and The George Alexander Foundation to create other CMS management efficiencies.
Using a custom-built CMS Multisite module, we then enabled The Ian Potter Foundation to share assets and manage content across three different websites via one easy-to-use CMS. The other Foundation websites in question were:
- The Ian Potter Moving Image Commission, and
- The George Alexander Foundation.
Fully responsive with a large-format grid system, the new website truly reflects the foundation's position at the forefront of Australian philanthropy. In 2022, our work with the foundation was publicly recognised, winning Silver in the Melbourne Design Awards.
