A Milwaukee, WI Based City ICOn
Light The Hoan is a nonprofit organization that illuminated the Daniel Hoan Memorial Bridge in Milwaukee, WI. It now serves as a symbol of hope for the city of Milwaukee and the organization uses the bridge for various programming helping further develop the Milwaukee area.
Graphic Brother was initially approached in 2020 to see if we could bring Light The Hoan’s virtual interactive donation experience to life. This donation experience would allow users to dedicate a bulb on the bridge as a donation.
Upon initial web experience launch Light The Hoan saw major success. The new website facilitated over $20,000 in bulb dedications from the community in its first month! This source of income ensures the Hoan Bridge Lights will light the Milwaukee skyline and serve as a symbol for pride and unity for years to come.
That wasn’t it for our only journey working with Light The Hoan (LTH). Following our project or redesigning and developing their site for the first time and a never-before-created interactive donation experience we were tasked making the donation experience more seamless. As any good marketer and designer should know you need to listen to your customers and we got feedback to remove two steps from the donation experience to make it quicker and easier resulting in more donations.
Initially, the dedication experience was built so that you purchased and then we’re emailed a verification code which you’d input into the screen you get redirected to finish your dedication. To reduce friction on our new refresh we simplified this experience to be verified during the purchase. This resulted in a higher conversion rate and overall more satisfied donors.
The main point of our new refresh was to flex our creative muscles and show the skills we’ve gained in two years of designing and developing websites. Not only that increase the UI/UX of the website allowing visitors to find exactly what they’re looking for. Naturally, as an organization expands and changes it will add services, pages, and functionality. This also naturally causes the websites to slowly get bloated and more confusing. Along with the discussion of creating a more streamlined donation process, this spawned the idea of a full refresh.
During our time working alongside LTH we’ve collaborated on multiple projects and websites. We’ve helped them run one of their programs which is the Intern Challenge where they work with local corperations and train their interns how to create shows on the bridge. Then teams compete and the interns and their operations vote on who has the best lightshow. We built a landing page that helps count these votes, show the shows, and be a hub of information during this project. We also helped film the training and the culmination of this event called the Intern Mixer.
They also approached us the Summer of 2023 to help create a landing page for an event coming up where they’d bring boats all together for a show under the hoan bridge synced up to their lights. This event was called Hoanchella and we developed a fun interactive website that was informational and helped sell tickets. It operates as a hub for questions, information, and to collect more sponsorships.
Since its launch, they’ve gotten fantastic feedback from the community and are more than happy to direct people to its website.
We were happy to welcome Light the Hoan to the Graphic Brother family and we look forward to continuing our relationship in the future. Graphic Brother Marketing will continue to provide website assistance and consultation for Light The Hoan as they continue to serve their community.
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