Carolina Creates

Carolina Creates, a student organization at UNC, came to New Media Campaigns in need of a website to support their mission to foster creation through connecting different parts of UNC’s campus with similar interests.  NMC understood that the organization needed a centralized place to share and discover opportunities, ideas, and support in order to connect these various parts.  The new interactive, dynamic website, designed and developed on HiFi, is composed of several key customized features.

The Discover page was designed to simplify the process of finding relevant opportunities and resources.  Visitors can perform a search by entering keywords, selecting a category, and clicking the “discover” button. Then they can further refine their results by selecting the type of content they are seeking, such as courses, event, grant, or organization.

Each search result has its own profile, consistently formatted, including corresponding images, image slideshows, videos, video slideshows, quotes and information. For example, specific types, like courses, also have information like course times and locations. A custom built CMS manages the profile information, allowing Carolina Creates to easily populate the site with a spreadsheet upload. 

Similar to the Discover area, each initiative found via the Crowd Funding page has its own profile as well.  These profiles display a bar graph of the percent of money that has been given—data that is entered into custom fields in the CMS.  Potential donors can select an initiative that they would like to specifically fund, making donations more personalized and unique.  

Built on UserVoice and customized to match the site design, The UNC Ideas page allows people to submit and vote on new ideas for UNC’s campus.  Visitors can also post ideas via an easy-access popup on the homepage.  NMC used UserVoice’s API to pull the top trending ideas into homepage feeds. 

Additionally, visitors are invited to sign up for email updates and check out the organizations social media pages, linked on the homepage.  

The end result is an extremely efficient, user-friendly experience on the back-end and front-end, allowing the organization to more easily add information and visitors to find information and connect.  NMC is confident that this site, hosting an abundance of well-organized resources and information, will aid Carolina Creates in their mission.