Humane World

Before the recent brand refresh to Humane World, the organization was split between two entities — Humane Society and Humane Society International — and were maintaining them via two separate websites. To make things more complicated, one site was on Drupal while the other on WordPress, so content editors were navigating content on two completely different systems with no cohesion between them. 

From the user perspective, another main challenge was that they found that both internal and external users had difficulty understanding their message when visiting the original site; rather than being an organization that was focused on animal protection and tackling the root causes of animal cruelty and suffering, they were commonly misconstrued as an animal shelter or a resource for pet owners. Other issues included users having difficulty finding content, a poor mobile experience, an uninspiring design that didn’t help gain new audiences, and no streamlined way to allow users to sign up to volunteer or donate.

It was time to consolidate the two websites and present a unified global brand experience to users worldwide.

Working in tandem with an outside PR agency who was managing the brand rename and refresh, Kanopi worked in three phases to consolidate the two sites. 

The first phase was to focus on the Humane Society’s Drupal site as well as their blog. We did extensive discovery and research, including content strategy work (including personas and audience research), a technical review, sitemaps, user testing, and wireframes. The second phase was to then repeat the same efforts with Humane Society International’s WordPress site. Both phases 1 and 2 took about six to eight months to complete. 

The final phase was then to amalgamate the two onto one platform and rework the design to accommodate both. The design was improved in several areas: 

• We created a mega menu that allows for media-rich blocks inside the menu as well as easy management of menu links.  
• To make form submissions easier, we migrated to a more best-in-class forms module called WebForm. 
• Accessibility was improved
• We streamlined their entities, cleaned up the admin experience, and deleted a lot of cruft. Using Kanopi’s Saplings work, we made their content editing experience component-based to make it easier to manage and more flexible.
• Visual data (numbers, maps and charts) are included throughout to better demonstrate what they do. 
• The imagery was reconsidered to tell a fuller and more complete story of how animals were being affected in each geographic location.

Because their timeline was aggressive due to the rebrand’s firm launch date, we made the decision to upgrade their existing Drupal site rather than building from scratch. As they were already on Drupal 10, it became a matter of simultaneously migrating the international WordPress site into the Drupal one to bring the entities together into D10. All content and media from past years was kept intact so the end viewer would have access to it in the new website regardless of which initial platform contained that content.