Wellstar Foundation inspires the community with just a few clicks

Wellstar is one of the largest health systems in Georgia, with nine hospitals, nine cancer centers, 18 urgent care centers, 300+ medical offices and more. As a not-for-profit health system, the Wellstar Foundation is vital to Wellstar’s mission to deliver preventative, whole-person care.

The Wellstar Foundation helps drive Wellstar's efforts to expand access to care across Georgia. While the two are closely aligned, both serve as separate entities, and the Foundation's entire online presence was previously limited in both its exposure and impact—residing solely within the health system's site. Wellstar wanted a more robust digital presence that would allow them to better share their purpose and stories, resulting in greater reach and awareness.

To make this happen, Wellstar partnered with JLL Design Solutions and together, they reimagined an entirely new website and created an all-new campaign to inspire the community to donate—Dare to Care BIG.

Wellstar Foundation needed to bring their target markets to life. This process began with a strategy workshop that included a competitor review, goals assessment and persona development.

With the strategy in place and the users in mind, JLL began to define the user experience (UX) approach and map out user flows. This included examining everything from how different users discover or arrive at the site, how they use the site and what their goals are for coming to the site, as well as what motivates each user persona to act by donating, subscribing to a newsletter or joining an affinity group.

Within the new UX, users can clearly identify the information available to them and actions they can take. Ever-present sticky navigation ensures users can always find a shortcut to the content they’re looking for. To keep the site inclusive and accessible to all, it's fully ADA compliant—including font sizes, colors, video captions and more.

In addition to an easily navigable site, the Foundation needed to express their visual identity across the new site without losing a connection to the Wellstar Health System brand. The JLL team used the Foundation brand guidelines as groundwork to build on.

The existing brand color palette was utilized, but rather than using purple as the primary color, the brighter teal was emphasized and incorporated more white space. Graphics inspired by the curved patterns used by Wellstar were then created to guide and prompt users throughout the site.

The result is a site that is clearly part of the Wellstar family but with its own distinctive look and feel.

As a donor-funded not-for-profit, the primary purpose of the site is to build awareness and then drive donations. The Foundation needed its site to help drive giving on all levels. The newly designed navigation keeps the Give Now button always in view while a variety of calls to action appear throughout the site, making it easy and intuitive for site visitors to become donors.

Active and engaging content also helps inspire giving. A self-updating ticker recognizes donors by name and gift amount, and some buttons are pre-populated with popular donation amounts to guide and motivate visitors. Even the list of supporter tiers is somewhat gamified to encourage giving. In addition to naming and listing the qualifying donation amounts for each tier, each divider bar also includes Give Now link—encouraging donors to aspire to give at a higher level.

Need and impact are two primary drivers of charitable contributions for any organization, which is why the Foundation wanted to build more awareness of their inspiring impact stories. These stories tell individual patient stories while explaining how Wellstar is meeting health needs across the state.

To highlight these stories, the JLL team designed two different modules. One is inspired by infographics used by Wellstar Health System and features big, bold stats along with photography and video content to bring stories to life.

The second is a robust, tabbed system that houses key facts and stories across the Foundation’s five areas of focus. Users can easily click between subjects without being taken to a different page. Within each subject, users can quickly toggle between “Our Focus” which highlights the needs in the community, and “Our Impact” to showcase positive outcomes. This smart module appears in a couple of different pages of the site, and defaults to different information depending on where it is. If users click to it from the Home page, it starts with Our Focus. When on the Impact page, each tab shows Our Impact first.

The Wellstar Foundation now has a dedicated and robust 16-page website with distinct UI, improved navigation, easy-to-use forms and scalable multimedia blog all built on a content management system that the Wellstar Foundation can update themselves. Plus, a new communications campaign is now live, helping drive visitors to the new site, inspire the community and encourage donations.

The new site is now live and the partnership between Wellstar and JLL continues to expand to continue to spread awareness of the Foundation’s purpose. The next phase is all about supporting the Dare to Care BIG campaign and will include the design and development of the campaign landing pages and print ads, video support and the pulling the campaign theme through the environments and multi-channel communications.