CASE STUDY: GEDAKINA

Gedakina's logo featuring a stylized red and brown four-petaled flower with a black circle in the center. Gedakina is a nonprofit organization based in Vermont and Maine.

Project Description

Fully Custom Website Redesign + Copywriting Guidance

Gedakina is well established for their work across New England, but their website does not reflect their true impact. They have an abundance of materials connected with this website showing the good work they do, but content organization is a challenge.

Goals:

  • Streamline and downsize content

  • Map out user flow for three different audiences

  • Create consistent on-brand visuals

  • Build e-commerce shop

A close-up of a red fuzzy caterpillar on a plant branch with green leaves.

About the organization:

Gedakina is a group of Native American/First Nations community organizers and traditional leaders, working with at-risk Native American youth to creating self-sufficiency, cultural awareness and caretaking of natural resources. They are extremely busy and their activities are very diverse.

Woman with glasses and long braided hair smiling at a kitchen counter with jars of assorted beans.

The problem:

Gedakina is an amazing organization with a lot of ideas and many projects connected in complex ways to their central mission. When they talk about their website, they quickly get overwhelmed with the enormity of the task of explaining what they do to a new audience. There was just so much to talk about.

The solution:

Helping Gedakina to simplify their website really meant helping them to clarify their mission. What do they do? For who? Who do you want to know about that? It became clear that their primary activities were education and outreach to Native Americans in the New England area. Once that was clear we could distinguish who the audience of the site was: community members, volunteers, and donors. We created pages based on who would be using them, and buttons to bring the selected audience members right to their goal location. 

Flowchart showing instructions for community members, program members, and donors or grant funders to navigate a website, including links to events, store, donations, educational videos, and program details, with contact page connections.

USER FLOW: 3 TARGET AUDIENCES

COLOR PALETTE

MOODBOARD

The nonprofit, Gedakina's Brand Mood Board showing brand colors and a collage of various handmade crafts and a woman outdoors. Items include beaded jewelry, woven baskets, fabric patterns, a knitted or woven box, and vegetables growing in a garden.
Color palette for VT-based nonprofit, Gedakina, with four circles: pale gray, reddish-brown, muted purple, dark gray, and their respective hex color codes