The Project

Open Connection with the Global Jewish Community

The global website of JAFI, a New York-based agency, collects donations from the Jewish community worldwide and plays a key role in engaging this community with Judaism, its roots, and the State of Israel. Despite being the largest Jewish organization in the world, the previous website was no longer able to connect with the community because it was outdated, with a confusing information architecture and thousands of pages scattered across different templates and structures.

The Challenge

Building Bridges of Connection

Our challenge was to increase donations, active participation, and Aliyah (Jewish immigration to Israel) through the portal. The point is that members of the global community have different levels of engagement with Judaism. We needed to learn more about them, so the first step was to map these levels using personas and their respective journeys. The second step was to define the information architecture that would direct appropriate content to each persona on the portal.

The Process

Trinational Effort

Tel Aviv and New York are just around the corner. The outracoisa* team worked directly with the Jewish Agency (based in Tel Aviv) and its agency in the Big Apple. In addition to these teams, the project involved stakeholders from around the world. The initial focus of the work was on personas and their journeys in their relationship with Judaism. The six personas defined represented different levels of engagement with Jewish culture.

The "user journeys" indicated features and content that could address the issues for each specific audience. We closed the backlog and began focusing on the information architecture, which needed significant simplification to make all content easily discoverable.

Product Key

Uncomplicated Donation

One of the Agency's main goals is collecting donations, but the interface used for this on the old website was particularly complex, and this ended up discouraging those who wanted to help. Therefore, we created a flow that prioritized clarity regarding both how the money is used and how to donate.

The Solution

Modular Organization

The base layouts are made up of different modules that run from one end to the other, organized to tell the story of each screen. This solution was chosen to provide greater versatility for editors while also saving development effort. The new visual identity replaced a monochromatic look, with varying shades of blue, for a generous color palette, which brought diversity and prevented the visual design from becoming monotonous.

Results

Portal with a capital 'P'

After many months of development, the website came to life, housing all of the agency's content and initiatives worldwide. The site receives 1.5 million visitors annually, half of which come from the United States and Israel, and the other half from dozens of countries around the world. After its launch, there was an increase in donations and qualitative metrics, such as pages per visit and time online, but these numbers cannot be disclosed to the general public.