Normally when clients come to Exygy, they have a design in mind that they want us to implement, something they want built from the ground up. With the Muslim Advocates nonprofit organization, however, there were some budget issues to consider. Given what they had to work with, we decided the best way forward would be to utilize a WordPress template theme, and then have us do some light design on top of that that, to modify certain features to better meet their specific needs.

The aim of the Muslim Advocates organization is to promote civil rights for Americans of all faiths, by seeking an end to racial profiling, hate crimes, and other injustices. They approach this in several ways: by creating coalitions to help challenge bigotry and hate crimes, by helping strengthen American Muslim charities and educating people about their legal rights, and by taking on high-impact lawsuits against wrongfully targeted American Muslims.

Creating a Website to Build Awareness

As such, the website is important to the organization for helping raise awareness, share news, and create buzz around press releases, multimedia clips, and events.

We decided the best way forward would be to utilize a WordPress template theme, and then have us do some light design on top of that that

To help bring all these elements together, we built them a custom home page to pull in content from their press center, blog, videos, and social media updates. We set it up so that they can choose which pieces go where, which items get higher priority, and so forth. The trick, of course, is setting it all up so that the client can enter content themselves and still have it appear correctly.

To achieve this, we used the Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin for WordPress, which is one of the plugins we use on just about every site we build. It tends to be appropriate across the board for client sites, because they don’t have to know HTML or formatting in order to use it. They can create and modify content as they wish without having to worry about anything else.

Building a Site to Process Donations

As with any website for a nonprofit organization, one essential feature of the Muslim Advocates site is the capacity to accept and process donations from visitors.

To this end, we built them a custom donations page to help streamline the system. The donor never has to leave the site in order to process the payment. This encourages visitors to keep exploring the site after they donate, and helps build trust by not redirecting to another site for payment processing.

We leveraged the Gravity Forms plugin (another favorite of ours), along with the Authorize.net add-on, which allows the website admin to make minor updates to the donation form and to easily see a list of donors. Then we used some slick jQuery animations and back-end magic to allow donors to make either a one-time donation or recurring monthly donations in a very streamlined, 1-step donation process.

We leveraged the Gravity Forms plugin (another favorite of ours), along with the Authorize.net add-on

We really like working with nonprofits, regardless of budget restrictions or the client’s level of experience with managing a website. The Muslim Advocates website is easy for them to update themselves, yet it maintains the look and feel of a professionally-updated site. In addition, we were pleased to offer them our discounted rate for nonprofits, which allowed them to have the kind of website they wanted and still stay within their budget requirements.