Hispanic Federation

Background

The Hispanic Federation (HF) is the nation’s premier Latino nonprofit membership organization, supporting over 600 nonprofit partners across 42 states and Puerto Rico to empower and advance the Hispanic community.

Challenge

As HF's influence expanded nationally, its digital presence struggled to keep up. The Hispanic Federation needed to transform their digital presence to reflect their growth from a New York-based nonprofit to a national advocacy powerhouse. Their existing website was built on a restrictive proprietary system (ARCOS), making it difficult for staff to build attractive landing pages or update content easily, leading to walls of text that overwhelmed users.

Additionally, the organization’s digital footprint was fractured between a main site and 17 microsites built on different platforms with varying levels of professionalism and inconsistent structure, branding, and writing styles. Valuable information was scattered across the ecosystem, which cannibalized traffic and confused users trying to navigate between the main site and standalone campaign sites.

Throughout the project, the team encountered significant hurdles:

• High Staff Turnover: Critical stakeholders, including the VP and Director of Communications, left the organization mid-project (April and June), leaving new leadership to inherit the project during the critical Development and QA phases.
• Content Delays: The client struggled to draft content for the new site, specifically regarding post-launch feedback and finalizing pages, which repeatedly pushed the timeline.‍
• Scope Creep: Late-stage requests surfaced, such as changes to the "Members" content type and requests for an interactive map that was out of scope.

Solution

As the lead on discovery and strategy, I facilitated the transition from a fragmented ecosystem to a centralized, audience-centric digital platform.

• Strategic Consolidation: Developed a comprehensive Content Migration Plan and Sitemap to consolidate 12 distinct microsites (e.g., La Voz de mi Gente, Take Action for Puerto Rico) into the main website, improving SEO authority and user experience. This broke down internal silos and established a single source of truth for the organization.
• Audience-Centric Architecture: Moved away from organizational-focused navigation to clear pathways for key audiences: Member Organizations, the General Public (seeking legal/crisis resources), and Donors.
• Flexible Design System: Migrated the site to WordPress and determined components for a modular component library that allows the HF team to build custom, visual layouts without code—solving the "wall of text" issue.
• Addressing Project Bumps:
  
  • To mitigate content delays, I provided detailed Content Outlines and templates to guide their writing process.
  • To address the high staff turnover, I conducted a second CMS Training session specifically for the incoming communications team to bridge the knowledge gap left by departing staff.
  • Technical Integrations: Oversaw the implementation of Weglot for Spanish translation management and Blackbaud and Phone2Action for donations and advocacy campaigns.

Result

The new Hispanic Federation website successfully launched on July 16, 2024, delivering a modern, accessible, and national-focused digital presence15.

• Unified Ecosystem: The new architecture successfully merged the fractured microsite ecosystem  into one cohesive domain, reducing content redundancy and improving the user journey.
• Exceptional Site Health: Upon launch, the site achieved perfect scores of 100 in SEO and 100 in Best Practices on Google Lighthouse, along with a 93 in Performance and 91 in Accessibility16.
• Quality Assurance: The site launched with less than 1% broken links, significantly outperforming the industry launch average of 2.4% - 5%.‍
• Improved Usability: Features like a persistent "Table of Contents" and visual content chunking have made HF's resource-heavy pages significantly easier to digest.