Camp Cocker Rescue, based in Los Angeles CA, has been rescuing high-needs Cocker Spaniels since 2007, providing medical treatment and finding new homes through a robust and careful adoption program.
Like so many small nonprofit organizations powered by a dedicated founder and a team of volunteers, Camp Cocker had a DIY website, built using Squarespace, that had exploded to over 1,000 separate URLs and the number of dogs rescued and adopted grew year after year.
Maintaining the website was time consuming and manual. There were many upgrades that the team wanted to make but couldn’t because of the time investment, or lack of functionality on the aging Squarespace website. It was clearly time for a new, more efficient and sustainable system!
Founder Cathy Stanley approached Lauren Atherton of HeartSpark Design for a new brand and website project, and Lauren contracted with me to bring her designs to life.
Our Process
We started our process with a detailed content audit of the existing website, which uncovered over 1,000 individual URLs, including duplicate pages for many of the dogs. We spent time reviewing user journeys for the new website, and breaking down all the data about each dog that needs to be shared.
We decided to develop a custom content type for the new WordPress site to power the dog profiles, with a set of custom fields to mirror the internal database that Camp Cocker maintains as dogs arrive, are listed for adoption, and are eventually adopted. The new dog profile content type in turn powers multiple different pages on the new website, allowing us to display listings of dogs with different statuses.
In the past, the Camp Cocker team would manually create a Squarespace page for each dog. When a dog was adopted, they would create a second, separate page for that dog in the “Rescue Yearbook” section of the website.
Now, when a dog’s profile status is changed from Available for Adoption to Adopted, the fields displayed on the dog’s profile are updated automatically and the profile is removed from the Available Dogs page and added to the relevant year in the Rescue Yearbook.
Take a look at this video to see how dog profiles show up in different places on the website:
View a demo of the Camp Cocker Rescue website
To manage the time-consuming process of migrating dog profile information for hundreds of dogs, I built a workflow that automated as much of the data migration as possible, pulling updated profiles from the Camp Cocker team’s Airtable base into WordPress.
The website also includes a Resource Library that with search and filter-by-category options, and a robust integration with FundraiseUp for online giving, both visible in the demo video above.
Now that the new website is live, we are working on streamlining the dog adoption process even more, with the goal of freeing up more volunteer hours from administrative work to focus on caring for the “campers” and raising more funds to expand the organization’s work.
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