Posse Foundation

posse foundation desktop home page design

Some programs are about helping students get into college. Others are about helping them stay there. The Posse Foundation is about changing the face of American leadership.

Urban youth are being systematically excluded from pursuing educational opportunities, often due to limited access to high-performing schools and college preparatory experiences. Those who do go on to college are more likely to drop out compared to their suburban peers. This unique nonprofit foundation makes a lifelong commitment to each student taken under its wing—and the members of Posse extend that same spirit of mentoring and giving back when they enter the workforce.

Founded in 1989, Posse started because of one student who said, “I never would have dropped out of college if I had my posse with me.” Each year, Posse serves thousands of nominated students by selecting and training hundreds of Posse Scholars and matching them with more than 50 partnering universities offering four-year, full-tuition scholarships. The foundation identifies public high school students with extraordinary academic and leadership potential who may be overlooked by traditional college selection processes, and embeds them in something between a family and a community, helping them succeed not only in college, but professionally, for a lifetime. As a result, the average graduation and persistence rate of Posse Scholars is over 90%.

What we did

Research
Content Strategy
Design & Branding
Development
Back-end development
Branding & Identity
CMS customization
Front-end Development
Implementation support
Stakeholder interviews

Industry

Higher Education
Nonprofits

We redesigned the Posse site originally in 2007, but in 2017, the fixed-width site was overdue for an upgrade.

We have had the benefit of working with Posse on a number of projects. The first was a redesign of the original Posse website in 2007, when fixed-width and small type was all the rage. Our first redesign was, in spite of its age, still serviceable, still functional, still useful. But the site is very much a product of its time, and shared the issues of its time. Content was dense and deep and sometimes organized strangely, presumably for want of places to put it. The architecture was oriented toward audiences, a popular way to architect websites in 2007, rather than actions or tasks. But Posse has become older, wiser. This time, our work was a redesign of our redesign—the very first time we’ve been done that.

There were many goals for our redesign. First, the old website was not responsive and other aspects of the design and code were outdated, so bringing our decade-old work to the modern era was a given. Additionally, the legacy site was powered by an out-of-the-box, outdated version of ExpressionEngine, so re-platforming to a modern CMS was also a big to-do (we chose Craft CMS).

The site tells the stories of Posse alumni that underscore personal success as well as Posse's success as an organization.

The list of high quality schools Posse partners with speaks for itself.

We used school supplies to add extra life to success statistics.

Our strategic recommendations for the redesign, assisted by information architect and structural content strategist Lisa Maria Martin, prescribed that the redesign be built upon a narrative experience through literal storytelling, showing more (without necessarily telling less), and being authentically Posse.

Like the organization, the site offers many opportunity for fostering long lasting partnerships.

Nobody in the U.S.—and perhaps the world—is doing what Posse’s doing. Our bold redesign (of our redesign) helped them proclaim that fact from the rooftops.