African Parks is a conservation non-profit that manages 10 national parks in seven African countries. In 2016 African Parks brought in Brick Factory to rethink its entire digital strategy. Our team helped African Parks grow its social media following and email list, implement a targeted online advertising strategy, and create an aggressive online fundraising campaign.

After the success of our initial engagement, African Parks engaged Brick Factory to redesign its website in early 2017. The goals of the redesign were to improve site usability, effectively tell the story of African Parks work, and to make the site a more effective vehicle for recruiting supporters and donors.

• Program Strategy & Planning
• Informational Architecture
• List Building
• Online Fundraising
• Content Audit & Strategy
• Technology Audit & Strategy
• Drupal Development

Site Design

African Parks has great content assets. They have relationships with some of the world’s best wildlife photographers and have invested in breathtaking video footage of their parks. In designing the site our goal was to have the design get out of the way so that African Parks could tell its story through photography and videos.

After a thorough review of site usage patterns and discussion with African Parks stuff, it became clear that the legacy site had a variety of usability problems. The site’s navigation system was confusing and as a result visitors weren’t aware of the wealth of content that was available. We solved this problem by designing an easy-to-use mega menu system that properly orients both desktop and mobile visitors.

Parks Pages

African Parks manages 10 national parks in seven African countries. A key goal of the site is to promote the parks and to encourage users to visit them. To promote the parks we created an interactive that allows visitors to quickly navigate through the parks.

African Parks has a wealth of content about each park (general background, information on flora and fauna, visitor information, etc.). Given that we created a mini-homepage for each park that conveys to visitors all the information that is available while keeping users oriented in the main site structure.

Flexible Donation System

As a non-profit, raising money online is a big priority for African Parks. We designed a beautiful and flexible donation system for African Parks that inspires people to donate while also making the process as simple to complete as possible.

Building in Drupal 8 and Stacks

We decided to build the new African Parks site in Drupal 8, primarily because the platform has most of the required functionality available out of the box. In order to increase flexibility and improve the content management experience, we extended Drupal 8 with our Stacks Module. Stacks allows content managers to build beautiful and complex pages themselves using reusable widgets.

Click here to learn more about our use of Stacks on the African Parks website.