We designed and built a new responsive website for the Ohio agency overseeing foster care and adoption to help educate the public about the need for foster and adoptive parents.
With a swelling number of children needing caring homes and support both short-term and long-term, the state of Ohio wanted to raise awareness for the need for foster and adoptive families. The state also wanted to dispel myths about foster care and adoption and to provide critical information to engage existing and prospective parents.
Unfortunately, most people didn't know that a foster care and adoption website existed. And those who did visit found a site that was outdated, had little useful content, and was not user-friendly.
Ohio’s Foster Care andAdoption agency chose to partner with g2o to launch a new website and marketing campaign that would raise awareness and recruit future foster caregivers and adoptive parents.
The site had to be built on the state’s Innovate Ohio Platform and the agency chose g2o because we had prior experience working with this unique platform as well as the in-house design, content, and technology expertise to guide them through the process of creating a new responsive website.
"This new website and public awareness campaign will help Ohioans interested in foster care and adoption better access information about the process with the goal of encouraging more families to open up their homes and hearts to children in need."
Gov. Mike DeWine
We started by meeting with the agency to fully understand exactly what they wanted to accomplish with their new website and their marketing campaign. We learned about the many misconceptions surrounding foster care and adoption and the difficulties recruiting foster care and adoptive parents.
We then interviewed existing parents and agency representatives to understand what people needed at each stage of their journey. From these interviews, we produced journey maps that we validated using a parent focus group. Overall, the insights we gathered informed what content was needed and how to organize it in a way that would make sense for prospective parents.
Once approved, our team began the design and build of the new site using the Innovate Ohio Platform to help improve content sharing and "findability." The team dramatically expanded the web copy — from two to over 80 pages of content. To enhance traffic to the new site, the team branded, developed, and launched an integrated awareness campaign.
Finally, the team provided training and technical support to the agency staff on how to edit, update, and create new pages.
The campaign is helping to increase awareness and interest in fostering or adopting children across the state. The campaign is designed to drive current and prospective parents to the new website where they can:
The success of the campaign will initially be measured by the increase in visitors and their engagement on the website.Ultimately success will be based on increasing the number of parents who are willing to open up their heart and their homes for a child in need.
Since it was launched, the foster care and adoption campaign and website has been promoted by new Gov. Mike DeWine, which in turn resulted in statewide media coverage.
