The Challenge

http://www.americkecentrum.cz
The American center organizes a vast number of lectures, exhibitions and has an extensive library. Typically the center holds or endorses tens of events each month. The center was using the basic web system provided by the US State Department for all the embassies around the world. They found it difficult to publish all of the events that they hold or support in this existing system. Being able to categorize the different types of events and to be able to manage this both in Czech and English was simply impossible.

The American Center needed to have a community portal that would make it simpler for their Czech and English speaking visitors to keep track of what was going on. They needed to constantly add and update events, photo galleries and information pages and also to manage an extensive and constantly growing newsletter.

The Solution

We worked together with the American Center and AnFas, a well-known branding agency based in Prague, to develop a complete solution for the center's on-line communication. In this project the creation of personas to clearly specify the exact needs of different visitor types was invaluable. By finding out what the different actual visitors types required we were able to make a site that easily lead visitors to the information they were looking for.

Tight integration with the MailChimp newsletter system has improved their ability to manage and analyze their regular mailings and its impact.

The Results

User testing based on task lists related to the personas and their needs has confirmed that the site is much easier to navigate then the previous web system. American center staff have all appreciated how easy it is for them to manage the new system.

Best of all, after implementing the new web community portal, attendance at all events and exhibitions has increased.