Salem Animal Rescue League

Services: web site design, CMS development

Background: The Salem Animal Rescue League is a nonprofit organization that shelters and finds new homes for abandoned pets in southern New Hampshire. SARL approached Danconia Media after hearing about our web design grant program specifically for nonprofits and charities in the Granite State. They sought a clean design, a user-friendly content management system and social media plugins to enhance its communications with volunteers and supporters.

Before: SARL’s previous site featured an outdated style and was very difficult for its member to update in-house. As with many organizations’ web sites, its structure made it difficult for the site’s visitors to navigate. The SARL team felt they needed a world-class web site in order to find pet adopters and volunteers and raise money for its planned relocation and building project. As is the case with most nonprofitIts, SARL lacked the funding to build a site on its own and effectively market itself online.

After: Danconia built SARL a new site from scratch using a highly user-friendly CMS that makes it easy for anyone, even members with no web editing experience, to add and modify content to within minutes. We installed CiviCRM, a robust open-source system that allows SARL members to manage donations, volunteers and upcoming events from a single interface. We also integrated the PetPoint Animal Management System, a program that automates the process of adding animals to the site’s database. This component was especially crucial for SARL, which takes in abandoned dogs and cats on an ongoing basis.

We designed the site to be as interactive as possible. Visitors can rearrange the layout of the home page and sub pages just by moving their mouses as well as watch videos a view pictures of pets available for adoption. We also incorporated SARL’s Twitter and Facebook accounts and made it easy for visitors to share the site’s content using popular social bookmarking services like Digg, StumbleUpon and Delicious.

Reaction: SARL’s leaders were greatly satisfied with the end result, and commented that the redesign would help them in serving the Salem area. SARL President Lori Bertrand said Danconia “captured exactly what we were looking for in a very user-friendly web site.” Ray Denis, SARL’s development director, added: “Our new web site will give us the ability to reach out to so many people in many ways, including enhancement of our surrender and adoption programs, education, fundraising and our Capital Giving Campaign. Overall, we will have the ability to promote SARL in ways tht we have never been able to before without this important contemporary tool.”