Schusterman Family Philanthropies

The Client

Founded in 1987, the Schusterman Family Philanthropies strives for a future in which the United States and Israel live up to their highest ideals and achieve more just and inclusive societies. Schusterman invests in efforts to advance racial, gender, and economic equity in the U.S., as well as to strengthen the Jewish community and Israel. The foundation aims to drive and support long-term systemic change through investments in leaders, organizations, and U.S. public policy.

The Situation

In 2021, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation underwent an effort to rebrand itself to reflect the continued expansion of grantmaking, operating, and advocacy activities funded by the Schusterman family. As part of the rebrand, the foundation redesigned their website to meet three key goals: 

• Create a new visual identity for its site
• Better position its wide-ranging portfolio of work in the United States and Israel
• Provide in-house content authors with broader, more flexible publishing capabilities
   

Content authors needed to better manage content and assets across teams while also ensuring flexibility when publishing content across the site. Additionally, program managers needed to be able to apply program-specific navigation and branding, while still making their site sections feel like they are a cohesive part of the overarching Schusterman Family Philanthropies brand.

The Challenge

The organization faced numerous challenges during its redesign: 

• The website redesign was happening in parallel with the organization's rebranding effort, and many design decisions were still in flux
• Framing the breadth and impact of the organization’s portfolio areas proved challenging
• The organization wanted to provide its content authors with greater flexibility
• The revamped site needed a flexible design system capable of supporting tailored program experiences

The Solution

Schusterman Family Philanthropies partnered with Velir, and the teams expanded their preliminary content and site structure recommendations into a complete information architecture that connected philanthropic portfolios with the regions in which the work is conducted. At the same time, Velir identified a suite of components to support established content needs. After the organization finalized its new brand identity, Velir started its full website design. 

To streamline content publishing, Velir upgraded the Schusterman Family Philanthropies' content management system to Drupal 9. It also integrated Acquia DAM and Salesforce, centralizing assets for ease of use and making publishing even more efficient.

After implementing the CMS, Velir provided content publishing training, content planning documentation, and content entry to support platform adoption and ensure a successful site launch. 

The Results

Site metrics show an increase in engaged traffic. There has been as much as an 87% increase in time spent on pages and a 28% lower bounce rate.

Schusterman.org now provides compelling, accessible, actionable resources for its key audiences. It expands on the organization's rebrand and content strategy, offering a reorganized information architecture, a flexible design system, and expanded Drupal content capabilities that allow authors to craft nuanced digital experiences.

And Schusterman's content authors have found Site Studio to be efficient, empowering them to easily and confidently make site edits, with one user remarking, "It's a game-changer to be able to use the Page Builder feature to see the content layout as I'm building it. It makes it so much easier to adjust things in real time. All the new components really help our content be much more visually engaging. Everything used to be text-based, and now, even for text-based content, there is so much variety in how we can display it, and it does not feel monotonous at all. It's so user-friendly – I was able to pick up page building very easily with minimal training.