At Checkerboard, we love working with nonprofits, which is why we were especially excited when Scott County reached out to us to help a partner with their website. Families & Individuals Sharing Hope (FISH) needed us to move their website off of Sharepoint, where many features were broken, and onto a platform that was easier to manage and more future-proof. FISH is an organization that helps 80 different partners in the faith, business, service and government sectors come together to fill the needs of their community.

Partners who are registered with the FISH website can post and fill needs, many of which are submitted by social workers in the county. They range from needing help paying rent after having a medical emergency, to finding the dental work that a single mom can’t afford for her child. Partners and affiliates within the community can step up to provide services to those in need.

The FISH website consists of two parts: the external website and the internal application where the connections take place. Checkerboard was tasked with recreating and streamlining the process for needs to be posted and met.

We started by identifying keywords, as we do with all of our Best in Market builds, and then structuring the external site with SEO in mind. We took pages that were redundant and organized them to make a better user experience. The look was also updated to be more modern, and really bring out the brand.

Building the internal application was a much more complex process. It involved the creation of multiple custom post types all of which needed to relate to each other in different ways. Needs are posted by partners and affiliates. Other partners and affiliates can then make offers, which are approved by the original poster of the need.

Each step has an approval process, and each step also includes multiple emails which are sent to a combination of administrators, the poster, and other partners and affiliates. None of these features were out of the box and we created quite a bit of custom code to make it all work together.

Now that the site has been up for a few months, things are going well and we’re training in the FISH administrators on how to manage the new site and pull the reports they need in order to report back to the board.

We are thrilled to have been a part of this project and can’t wait to see it reach even more people in the Scott County community.