The National Park Foundation Web Site

National Park Foundation Home Page

National Park Foundation Interactive Timeline

The National Park Foundation (NPF) is the only national charitable partner of America’s National Parks, helping to restore and revitalize American parks for future generations. NPF’s mission is to strengthen the connection between the American people and their national parks, ensuring that all Americans have the opportunity to experience, benefit and become actively engaged with these remarkable places. The Foundation accomplishes its mission by raising essential funds that help support national parks through programs and projects.

Requirement

NPF turned to Matrix Group to transform its Web identity from a focus on park travel to presenting the Foundation squarely as the charitable partner of the National Park Service. NPF wanted to increase market awareness for their programs and projects and call on all Americans to help support the parks as part of their cultural and historical legacy.

Matrix Group Solutions

Web Site

Matrix Group redesigned NPF’s Web site showcasing the spectacular images of the National Parks, making the visitor’s experience on the site come alive and appeal to their sense of responsibility to support the parks through charitable donations.

The NPF site incorporated new tools and technologies including:

An Interactive Timeline celebrating 100 years of generosity.
A flexible framework to allow NPF to update the period photographs and descriptive text.
A Content Management System (CMS) for managing and maintaining dynamic content
RSS Feeds to streamline content and news headlines, and make it readily available for visitors throughout the site
Social Networking to reach visitors of the younger generation through sharing tools, links to social networking and bookmarking sites
Web Analytics to help track the activity and performance of the new site, including the most shared, visited and abandoned pages
Hosting and Managed Services from Matrix Group for high availability, reliability and security

Matrix Group also generated Banner Ads to promote specific programs, such as NPF’s First Bloom project, on the New York Times Web site.

Results

In the five month period from when the site was launched:

Visitors increased by more than 10%
Average site visit went from 12 min to over 14 min
Page views jumped from 220,000 to 822,000

Awards

The NPF Web site is the proud recipient of the 2008 Standard of Excellence Award for Nonprofits from the Web Marketing Association and 2007 Outstanding Achievement Award from the Interactive Media Council.