Playitforward Kids

UX/ UI Design, Web Design, Mobile Design, Marketing, Branding

Project Description

Playitforward Kids is an organization that hosts free events for kids that demonstrate kind acts and giving on a daily basis to teach them how good it is to give back. We worked with Playitforward Kids to develop their retail subscription box website in 2015. When they reached out in 2017 about transitioning and focusing on free events for kids we were excited to help out. PlayitforwardKids have multiple chapters that hold events in different areas, with different partners managing the events of their prospective chapters. So they needed a backend portal that would allow:

– The ability for an admin to set up and manage users (partners of different chapters)
– Control access rules for different users
– The ability for users to set up events and track ticketing for events.
– The ability for users to check people in at an event

And a front-end interface that would give customers the ability to:

– Register for events
– Receive confirmation of reservation
– See how many tickets are left for an event
– Make donations

Because Playitforward Kids events are funded exclusively by donations it was very important to keep the donation calls to action at the forefront of the user’s attention. Also, they needed to track what donations were made to what chapters.

Our Role

We worked directly with the founder to define goals and establish a timeline to complete objectives. We were responsible for every aspect of this project.

Because the functionality of this site was completely different than the previous subscription-based site we started from scratch. We first created architecture and UX workflows based on user stories and possible user personas, keeping at the forefront of our mind that the donation aspect of the site had to commingle with the event information and all other pages. Another challenge was balancing educating new visitors to the site about the philosophy of Playitforward Kids and, and keeping the site fresh for regular visitors who check back weekly looking for new events and content.

We recommended using a CMS (content management system) to give their organization some autonomy and flexibility when it came to updates, site management, user management and permissions. In this case, WordPress seemed to be a great fit. We used a few third-party plugins to handle the front-end and back-end requirements. This kept the budget low and speed up development time. We created a custom solution to manage accounting of donations to individual chapters that integrated with PayPal. We continue to maintain amber waves web properties today.