Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans
Revamping a brand and digital experience to honor America’s immigrant experience
The challenge
The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans provides merit-based funding for New Americans, immigrants and children of immigrants, who are poised to make significant contributions to U.S. culture, society and academia. The organization needed to upgrade their decade-old website to better serve Fellows with a more user-friendly experience that allowed for powerful storytelling and was easy for the PD Soros team to integrate, manage, and maintain.
Specifically, we looked for new ways to highlight the diverse alumni and their focus areas and needed to improve the Fellows directory and application user experience.
The Solution
Modern Tribe reimagined the PD Soros brand and website visual language to reflect the prestige and diversity of the Fellowship. We built a robust and easy-to-use website on WordPress to support various content types, including a user-friendly filtered Fellows directory integrated seamlessly with Salesforce.
A vibrant brand for diverse audiences
We initiated the project with a thorough discovery and design phase, collaborating closely with PD Soros to understand their business goals and audiences. Building on an already established brand, we designed a brand system that feels vibrant and dynamic, engages diverse audiences and reflects the exceptional contributions of the Fellows. We introduced a new typography and color palette and built templates and brand guidelines to ensure scalability of the PD Soros brand beyond the website.
Showcasing a huge network of Fellows and their stories
One of the unique features to this site is a robust filtered Fellow Directory that houses 700+ past and present PD Soros Fellows and their unique stories. We designed and implemented an intuitive filter system that allows visitors to easily search for Fellows by various criteria, such as heritage, university, and field of interest. Plus, we added opportunities throughout the site to serendipitously explore Fellows you may not search for otherwise.
A critical requirement for the Fellows directory was the integration with Salesforce, allowing PD Soros staff to update Fellow profiles in Salesforce efficiently and ensure the most current information was always available on the website. Our team developed a custom plugin to ensure seamless data synchronization between the website and Salesforce.
Crafting a dynamic editorial experience for both visitors and creators
Building on WordPress, we were able to leverage the powerful visual editing experience to craft blocks, patterns, and templates that make updating and creating beautiful content on the website easy and painless. From news updates and events to information-rich landing pages about the Fellowship and how to apply, WordPress provided a flexible platform for easy and accessible content creation.
With helpful links and improved navigation from initial awareness to pre-application, prospective applicants now feel they have support every step of the way.
It’s beautiful, well-organized, accessible, and such a great representation of who we are.Nikka Landau Senior Director of Marketing & Communications
Delivering outcomes
By enhancing the content strategy, incorporating more storytelling opportunities, and optimizing the website for accessibility and SEO, we helped PD Soros significantly increase overall audience engagement.
-
%Accessibility score from Google PSI, indicating the site is well-optimized for an inclusive user experience
-
%Increase in average engagement time comparing 3 weeks before and 3 weeks after launch
-
%SEO score from Google PSI, demonstrating the site is fully optimized for search engine visibility and ranking
Related Work
Yelp
It’s easier than ever for Yelp to target new customers in key verticals thanks to a robust multisite network and a modular content framework.
Steelcase
A 10-year collab with the world’s largest furniture manufacturer produced a robust multisite used by employees and customers around the globe.
BigCommerce
A fully-featured WordPress plugin allows brands to leverage the power of BigCommerce with the click of a button.