Website Re-Design for NYC Children's Nonprofit

DMF Youth seeks a web designer to redesign our nonprofit website. Our current website is hosted on WordPress. The current design feels outdated and does not reflect how expansive our programming is. We would have liked to edit this ourselves on our current website, however, the way the backend is setup makes it difficult for non-advanced users to edit. We would like the volunteer to review our current website and incorporate our goals and needs while considering our key audiences. It is important for the designer to consider our staff’s technical capabilities so that we can edit the website easily ourselves after the project is complete.

After assessing the current website, we would like the volunteer to either help us redesign and restructure the current one or build a new one if that seems to be the easier option. DMF Youth has many student photos, bright colors, and videos that can help create a vibrate and engaging website.

DMF Youth is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that empowers underserved students through high impact programs that build self-confidence, resilience, and grit. Our approach strategically blends three critical, yet missing components necessary for holistic youth development--physical mobility, arts education, and mental well-being. Driven by the vision of an equitable education system for all, we partner with Title 1 schools and homeless shelters across NYC to deliver free, accessible afterschool and summer programs.

Founded in 2015 to narrow opportunity gaps based on race and income, DMF Youth has served over 2,000 students across all five boroughs. Our unique approach seamlessly integrates dance, Social Emotional Learning (SEL), and positive psychology principles and was developed in collaboration between educators, mental health professionals, and artists. This comprehensive method equips students with essential tools to navigate challenges and cultivate robust mental well-being. With over 18 teaching artists, we currently serve five schools and two homeless shelters, reaching over 500 students every year. With a proven track record of fostering grit, emotional resilience, and essential life skills, we prepare students to confidently navigate the complexities of the world.

A volunteer’s donation of time and skills to this project will in turn help the hundreds of students we serve every year and provide them with afterschool and summer camp programming that will transform their lives. Additionally, we hope this project will benefit the volunteer professionally, whether by building their resume, gaining skills, or advancing their career. DMF Youth would be more than happy to be a reference after the completion of the project.

DMF Youth’s current website offers a decent starting point and we have a list of what we like and dislike about the website. We are prepared to brief you about the platform, budget restrictions for the build, our branding materials and guidelines, and information about our stakeholder groups and target audiences. We've also compiled some photos and have some language developed that we will share with you and samples of sites we like.

When DMF Youth first had our website designed, we only had a few programs and still developing as an organization. Because of this, we feel that our current website is not representative of where we are now. And while we have grown tremendously, all of our funds go directly to our afterschool programs and we do not have the budget to pay for a new website. Additionally, we have a very small team who are at full capacity and do not have the technical abilities to edit the current website. Now, more than ever, we need an updated website as we are hosting many more events, gaining more individual supporters, and launching a new program, Parents’ Corner. This program will provide the parents of our students much-needed resources and therefore, needs to be easily accessible on the website. Likewise, our new supporters need to be able to navigate through the website in a more sensible way.

With a new website that represents where we currently are as an organization and can attract donors, we hope to diversify our stream of income so we can maintain our current programming but increase the organization’s infrastructure. For example, we have a part-time development and communications associate that we hope to make full-time and eventually be able to edit the website themselves.

Our work will take place over multiple meetings in six to nine weeks. In our first meeting, the volunteer should interview us about our desired features, our web capabilities, and our technical expertise. Then, they'll synthesize the information into a requirements brief. We'll engage in various check-ins, where a member or members of our team will provide feedback. The volunteer will audit our current site to create a draft of site architecture and design options including wireframes, site structure, and other visual elements.