A modern and intuitive website for John Nurminen Foundation
The John Nurminen Foundation was established to ensure the preservation of maritime cultural heritage. The foundation is a significant societal influencer that works to protect marine nature, improve the state of the Baltic Sea, and promote maritime culture.
Background and goals
The John Nurminen Foundation was looking for a partner to revamp its online service, aiming for a more unified design, smoother user experience, and improved search engine visibility.
The project focused on a comprehensive overhaul, updating not only the website’s visual design and structure but also its technical solution. The website’s appearance was modernized and aligned with the new brand identity as part of the upgrade.
The foundation primarily funds its operations through donations and grants, which made one of the main goals of the project to optimize the website for marketing purposes, turning it into an effective tool for fundraising and communication. Special attention was given to designing user flows, simplifying the content structure, and creating functional donation funnels. As part of the redesign, the separate donation platform was integrated into the main website to improve overall functionality.
Intuitive user flows
We started the project with the conceptual phase, where we delved deeper into John Nurminen Foundation’s needs and desires. In this phase, we focused particularly on defining different target groups and their specific requirements, as understanding these was crucial for designing the donation pathways.
Before moving to visual design, we created wireframes — rough sketches of the website’s content structure and various elements. The wireframes helped us design intuitive user flows that guide visitors deeper into the site, providing them with more information and access to donation opportunities. These wireframes not only clarified the service structure but also helped to visualize its modularity and flexibility, as well as how the site’s framework and content groupings would appear as a whole.
”The collaboration was smooth and open throughout the entire project. During the design process, our needs were listened to, and new ideas were offered within the budget constraints. The carefully executed wireframes helped us visualize the overall concept, and during the content production phase, efficient and quick support accelerated our own work."
Johanna Suni
Communications Manager, John Nurminen Foundation
A reliable donation process
The John Nurminen Foundation offers various donation methods to serve different user groups. As donations are central to the foundation’s operations, the donation process needed to be reliable and as seamless as possible. The Foundation’s donation options can be broadly divided into one-time and recurring donations.
The previous donation platform was built on WooCommerce, and we recommended maintaining this setup. Donor data needed to be transferred to Salesforce, for which we used pre-built third-party plugins. These plugins ensured that the data synchronization between the website and Salesforce was clear and efficient, with alerts in place to notify of any errors or issues.
A modular approach for easy content management
The technical goals for the project included ensuring a long lifespan for the website, a modular structure adaptable to future needs, reliable donation functionality, and strong performance. Cost efficiency was also a key consideration during implementation and maintenance.
We built the Foundation’s website using the WordPress content management system, leveraging the Gutenberg content editor to enable smooth and efficient content management. With Gutenberg, content creators can quickly create new pages and manage all types of content with ease. Thanks to the use of content blocks, even large changes can be made without needing assistance from the vendor. During the design phase, we defined the blocks that content creators can use across the site, giving them the flexibility to make updates and adjustments independently.
Ongoing development and next steps
We are continuously working to improve John Nurminen Foundation’s online service. In addition to our Care team responsible for maintenance and security, the Foundation has its own project team at Evermade to address evolving needs and requests.
We have started implementing new features swiftly after the website launch. In the initial phase, our focus has been on further developing the donation diploma system, with attention to both the donor’s and the administrator’s perspectives. For future development, we plan to update the payment methods for recurring donations to support MobilePay and credit card payments, making the donation process even more flexible and seamless.
