Resource Area for Teachings

RAFT provides creative ideas and one-on-one mentoring to more than 10,000 educators so they can prepare kids to meet 21st Century challenges.

Our Big Wins in 2010

  • Setting strategic goals - WWorking with the RAFT leads we were able to quickly brainstorm and decide on four critical goals for today's efforts and particularly for the website.
  • Website rewritten, restructured, redesigned - Our most obvious effort was the visual redesign of the look and feel. The new design appeared simpler and more approachable at first glance and featured large imagery offset on top of a warm background reminiscent of the craft materialls at RAFT's hands-on learning facilities.
  • Newsletter and social media - When you are improving a website it is easy to overlook the related pieces that also communicate with customers. We raised the issue of the newsletter with RAFT and decided to dive in to help make it consistent with the new site's look and feel as well as tone of voice. To help make the newsletter and all RAFT communications more effective, we set it as part of a social media strategy we then coached them about engaging people and maintaining relationships through the blog, Facebook, Twitter and more. We set RAFT up with a suite of tools we find effective, including TweetDeck and Co-Tweet.
  • Annual report, stickers, postcards - One last component of our effort was an ambitious attempt to redesign their annual report for their upcoming presentations to stakeholders throughout the organization. This was a little crazy given the time constraints, but we managed to pull off a slim version with inserts and stickers showing off RAFT's recent success and charting a course for the new year! We even did postcards to send as 'Thank You's' for volunteers, just for good measure!

RAFT came to ZURB with the goal to fix the broken message and broken interaction on their website. This fit part of a larger effort to get more of their organization online to expand the reach of their materials and efforts.

Buoyed by their efforts over the past year, RAFT is making their website the center of their growth plans. By continually working on the web and iterating on their site's content and messaging, they've grown more confident to invest in their future online.

"It was awesome just to play with some of the kits they provide. Only a little distracting from the event, but really cool."

Jonathan Smiley, Designer, ZURB

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What We Accomplished in 24 hours

"It’s amazing to help an organization really communicate their value and general awesomeness."

Matt Kelly, Engineer, ZURB

An inspired team got the win

RAFT (Resource Area for Teaching) was our winning nonprofit. They came to ZURB with the goal to fix the broken message and broken interaction on their website. This fit part of a larger effort to get more of their organization online to expand the reach of their materials and efforts.

Buoyed by their efforts over the past year, RAFT is making their website the center of their growth plans. By continually working on the web and iterating on their site's content and messaging, they've grown more confident to invest in their future online.

This is no small shift for them--their organization has always been anchored around hands-on learning at physical locations. It's amazing to think what the spark at Wired has turned in to for them since.