Dayton Children’s Hospital
Overview
Over fifty years, Dayton Children’s Hospital had outgrown it’s main campus location. They needed to create spaces that reflected their commitment to their community and to care for patients’ complex medical needs. With that they began a fundraising event, “Reaching New Heights”. A revitalization that needed explanation and funding. A digital space was necessary in order to explain to donors what their donations were going to help achieve.
Roles
- Design
- Copywriting
- Front-end development
- Presentation and onboarding
Process
We used a traditional waterfall process when putting together the Dayton Children’s Hospital fundraiser website. This process provided them the most linear approach towards their goal with their team structure.
Requirements & analysis
The “Reaching New Heights” fundraising event started off great, but soon after they found themselves frequently getting more opportunities for remote donations without any way to illustrate their intentions or take those donations. The hospital needed a place to direct these potential donors and a secure location to obtain donations when not dealing with donors face-to-face.
Design
The focus of the design was an easy one; the patients. Their stories were the key point of interest for anyone who may be looking to donate to hospital’s cause. With those stories fresh in our minds we then focused on the tower itself. Seeing that the tower was largely glass, we drew inspiration from light. A set of fractal designs were developed that mimicked classic tin kaleidoscopes. Each design was then applied to a different floor of the new tower.
Those same designs were modified to communicate that brand online with their “transforming care” microsite. The microsite was focused on communication with the intent of inspiring the visitors to donate. It offered heart felt tributes called “miracle moments” about some of the hospital’s favorite patients. Elements of the hospital’s history were highlighted and explanations of how potential donations would be used was added for clarity.
Coding, testing, deployment and maintenance
The “transforming care” microsite was built using the WordPress content management system. Included with WordPress I installed for them a visual composer that allowed them to quickly load all of the previously created content they’d requested, but also make new templates themselves once they had created modules and widgets of their own.
Before deployment, I sat down with members of the Dayton Children’s staff to walk them through their content management system and a technical manual on how to utilize the microsites designs and features. After about a week they were self sustaining and made new additions to the site well past their fundraisers deadline.
Results and takeaways
The “Reaching New Heights” microsite played a major part in the fundraising efforts for Dayton Children’s Hospital. They were able to generate over $153 million in donations. The construction of the new patient tower has been complete since 2018 and has been providing higher levels of care ever since.
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