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Mohammad Robin
Founder & CEOBook a FREE Strategy Call
Mohammad Robin
Founder & CEOBook a FREE Strategy Call
The Kelly Brush Foundation helps people with disabilities stay active through sport. Boomdevs built The Active Project, the online home where their community connects.
Community Platform Development: Building a Connected Community for the Kelly Brush Foundation
Finding your people after a life-changing injury is hard. Finding people near you who ski, cycle or play wheelchair tennis is even harder.
The Kelly Brush Foundation exists to close that gap. It’s a nonprofit organization that helps people with disabilities lead active lives through sports communities, scholarships, grants and custom sports equipment.
The foundation works with partner organizations to support people whose lives have been changed by accidents, so they can stay engaged and empowered.
The Active Project is where that community meets online. Boomdevs designed and built it.
Industry
Nonprofit
Healthcare
Adaptive sports
Timeline
3 months
Website
Increase in user engagement
Monthly Community Growth Rate
Longer Average Session Time
“Boomdevs brought our vision for The Active Project to life. They truly understood what we were trying to build and made it better than we imagined. Our community finally has a space that feels like home.“
Executive Director, Kelly Brush Foundation
The Goal
The goal of The Active Project was to create a web-based platform that connects members of the Kelly Brush community, allowing them to:
• Find other community members in their area
• Discover events, partner organizations, scholarships, and grants
• Stay engaged through forums, messaging, and news updates
• Learn more about the foundation’s activities and offerings
The platform needed to foster engagement and provide seamless access to a variety of cross-functionalities, creating an integrated and connected community experience.
The Challenge
The Kelly Brush Foundation was facing several challenges before they approached Boomdevs:
• Multiple Functionality Integration: The foundation required a platform with multiple features, including events management, organization management, classifieds, forums, a member map, user messaging, and notifications. The challenge was to seamlessly integrate all these functionalities into a single, cohesive platform built on WordPress.
• User Engagement & Navigation: Creating an engaging and intuitive user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) was critical. With so many features to offer, the challenge was to ensure smooth navigation and easy access to all resources, making the platform inviting and easy to use.
Project Scope
Boomdevs was responsible for the entire development process:
• Wireframing and UI/UX design. An inviting interface that makes a big platform feel simple.
• Front-end and back-end development. A WordPress community platform, with custom code wherever features had to work together. WordPress also lets the foundation’s team manage content themselves, one of the main goals of our CMS integration work.
• Testing and launch. Every feature and integration checked across devices, so the platform works just as well on a phone. That’s the focus of our responsive web development work.
Key Features
Some of the core features of The Active Project include:
• Event Management: A system for organizing and managing community events, making it easy for users to find and register for activities.
• Partner Organization Management: Information about partner organizations offering scholarships, grants, and camps.
• Classifieds and Forums: A space for community members to connect, discuss, and share information.
• Member Map: A complex map that allows users to filter and find community members, events, partner organizations, and camps near their location.
• User Messaging and Notifications: An advanced messaging system to keep users engaged and connected, with notifications about events, grants, and other updates.
• Learning Resources: A section dedicated to educating users about adaptive sports and resources available through the foundation.
Challenges Overcome
The most significant challenges of the project were:
• Creating an Engaging UI/UX: The sheer number of features required careful design and testing to ensure an intuitive navigation system that allows users to browse, interact, and stay engaged with ease.
• Integrating Multiple Technologies: Combining WordPress with custom-coded elements for events, forums, and the member map required meticulous planning and development to ensure all functionalities worked smoothly together. More on how we connect systems like this in our software integration services.
• Scalability and Cross-Functionality: Connecting different features like the member map, events, and forums into a single platform while keeping the user experience seamless was a complex task that required extensive research and testing.
Process & Strategy
We followed a methodical process to ensure that all aspects of the platform met the client’s needs:
01
Requirement Gathering
02
Research & Design
03
Development
04
Testing & Deployment
Technologies Used
The following tools and technologies were utilized:
• PHP and JavaScript for back-end development and custom coding
• WordPress for the core platform
• Figma and Miro for design and wireframing
Results & Outcomes
The platform has had a significant impact on the Kelly Brush community:
• Increased Engagement: User engagement increased by 100%
• Community Growth: The community is growing at twice the rate every month.
• User Retention: The average time users spend on the platform has increased fourfold.
Conclusion
Here’s the lesson for any nonprofit or membership organization. Your community already exists. It just needs one place to meet. Spread it across a forum here, a calendar there and a mailing list somewhere else, and people drift away.
Bring it together, and they stay. That’s what good nonprofit web development does. If you’re planning a member platform, directory or community hub, we can help you build it.
Not sure yet what your members need most? Start with our user research service.
