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Case Study

Hope House

A Milwaukee based Homeless Shelter & Rapid Rehousing Facility

Hope House is Milwaukee’s premier homeless shelter, rapid re-housing facility, and permanent supportive housing provider. As Wisconsin’s largest city there are many people who fall through the cracks and need assistance. Hope House is here to provide this attention, care, and even shelter. Hope House was originally created in 1987 by five local churches to address homelessness on Milwaukee’s south side; over the years Hope House has evolved into a respected shelter known for providing support, services and a chance at a brighter future for families. Acting as a true community center, Hope House offers numerous programs and activities to assist men, women, and children struggling with homelessness. Graphic Brother Marketing was approached to bring its website to the current millennium with a focus on making it easier for visitors to find what they need. Their website was built with outdated web software that was difficult to use, so we decided to rebuild from scratch.

Based on our initial conversations with Hope House we decided to go with WordPress as the CMS, WP Give as the donation platform, and finally Elementor as the builder. Our favorite software Elementor is a visual page-builder that allows for easy copy/imagery updates in the future.

The pain point of this client was how hard it was to make changes to the website themselves. Also, there were many forms on the website that weren’t going to their respective emails. This is a huge problem as their goal is to help people and if forms or volunteer applications aren’t coming through it defeats the purpose. 

The features requested were an on-site donation portal, a volunteer application, and an overall updated UI which would also result in a better and easier UX. The main purpose of this website is for people to find the programs they are looking for (housing, education, and community programs). In doing our redesign we gave every individual program its own specific page which will boost its SEO significantly. This is not only great for them but great for the community searching for programs.  

"I met with eight different marketing companies looking for someone to help us redesign and reconfigure our incredibly outdated website. From my first virtual meeting with Graphic Brother, I knew this was the company I wanted to go with. Why? Because they listened. The understood what we needed and without hesitation we're able to provide valuable insight into what our current website was lacking and how they could help.

Long story short: Graphic Brother was easy to work with and aesthetically right on the money. They kept the feel of the original Hope House website while streamlining and tweaking everything. They gave us a very clean and easy to navigate website that gives a great impression of who we are as an organization, what we do in our community, and how visitors to the website can get involved."
Jim Farrell
Development Director

Lastly, they already had a strong brand identity with a nice orange and blue that they wanted to keep. Other than that we had a lot of flexibility in terms of design. So we focused on creating a design that easily allowed visitors to find what they are looking for and contact when needed. The homepage was designed to share the categories of their programs, highlight their most popular program, and get the community involved (employment and volunteer).

Since launch, they’ve seen a huge uptake in volunteer submissions and contact requests. They don’t even know how many contact requests came through before because it was going somewhere they couldn’t see. Since launching the redesign they’ve received 71 inquiries from people in need and 13 volunteer submissions in less than 30 days. They are also the first option on the first page of Google for “Milwaukee homeless shelter.”

We were happy to welcome Hope House to the Graphic Brother family and we look forward to continuing our relationship in the future. Graphic Brother Marketing will continue to provide marketing assistance and consultation for Hope House as they continue to serve their community. If you want to start a conversation get in touch below!