Centralizing property information for Eden Housing
To mark their 50th anniversary, Eden Housing, a nonprofit from the Bay Area working in the affordable housing space, came to Mission Minded with a desire to modernize their brand identity as they begin to roll out an organization-wide digital transformation.
For the website, we identified a few functional areas of focus as we rebuilt the site with the new visual identity, and streamlined much of the property information available on the site to avoid duplication of effort for the staff.
Client Eden Housing
Agency Mission Minded
The team A brand and web strategist, project manager, visual identity designer and myself
My role
Led stakeholder workshops
Collaborated on site architecture
Created low fidelity interactive prototype
Designed high fidelity web interface
Produced HTML/CSS/JS
Built customized WordPress theme
Site governance Client continues to maintain the site
Project Process:
Brand & Visual Identity Background
Mission Minded’s engagement with Eden Housing began with a full brand and messaging overhaul, followed by a visual identity facelift. My portion of the project started when it was time to apply this new brand and visual identity to the website.
Challenges & Opportunities
In a series of stakeholder workshops and user interviews, we uncovered a few key areas to focus
Outdated and incomplete lists on the website. One of the biggest pain points for both Eden Housing staff and prospective residents was the outdated availability list on the website. The list also did not tie in to any metadata about the properties in question, so home seekers were often left with questions about the details of a potential home.
Duplication of property information lists. Content on the site regarding available housing, housing in development, and housing managed by Eden were managed by different staff teams, leading to duplication of property information. This meant that occasionally, an update to the status of a property might have been reflected in one list in one place on the site, but not in another.
Several digital improvements and upgrades had begun, but many were works in progress. Planned updates to Sharepoint, a CRM migration, and changes to property management tools were planned and underway, but would not be available within the timeline of the brand launch and site build.
Creating one source of truth for property data
In our sitemap ideation process, we proposed that we solve for both challenges by unifying property information into one source of truth.
We learned during stakeholder interviews that a Sharepoint overhaul was underway but not yet ready to roll out. Centralizing property information on the website first would lay the groundwork to sync this to Sharepoint data once it was ready to go.
Other online tools for residents were part of the new property management suite of tools being rolled out in the next few years. To bridge the gap, we proposed a current resident landing page hub to serve as the launch point to available resources for launch, but can be built out to integrate new tools in the future.
Property data at the core
Prospective residents were the user group with the most to gain from including a centralized place for property information on the site, so we let their needs dictate a number of new features that benefited all users of the site.
We created a robust metadata set for properties to power a search and mapping feature on the site—leaps and bounds more useful than the static list that had been available on the previous site. With this metadata, filters can be created to sort properties by: availability, city, county, community type, unit size, accessibility, and amenities.
This same dataset became the backbone of information for funders and developers as well: automatically generating lists to track projects through the construction development pipeline based on the project “status” metadata.
When a property reaches a new construction stage, or opens for a waiting list or applications, the only change needed on the back end of the site is to update the status, and it will be pushed to the appropriate place(s) on the site, which eliminates the tendency for these lists to become out of sync.
Outcomes
Eden’s admin staff saw a 200% decrease in calls from prospective residents as property data became available online. This has freed up the same staff to work towards updating property photography for all open properties, another longer term goal of the visual identity update.
The site and property data is well well prepared to be integrated to the Sharepoint dataset. Matching metadata is in place and there is a planned project to automate this integration in 2021.