Jax’s Labrador Retriever Rescue
Website
Community Partner
The mission of Jax’s Labrador Retriever Rescue is “To rescue, rehabilitate, and rehome abused, abandoned, neglected, or unwanted Labrador Retrievers and Labrador Retriever mixes,” and the organization operates in PA/NJ/DE. The founder of the organization, Dan Mathers, states that “As a group, we started the rescue to help the dogs that mainstream Labrador Retriever rescues wouldn't save. These are the less "Labby" looking mixes, the harder to place dogs, and the dogs that have less of a chance of making it out of the shelters, but absolutely have the right and deserve the chance to escape these demoralizing, heart-breaking conditions.” Jax’s works to place these at-risk dogs into safe environments in an effort to contribute to the ongoing conversation on Animal Rights. They carefully examine possible adopters and perform in-home visits to ensure that the new owner and location will be a good fit.
Challenge
Our goal for Jax was to create a website for this new non profit in order for their already existing social media to have credibility. When creating a website and putting it onto social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter), it gave Jax an official space to do their work.
After meeting with Dan, we decided to use SquareSpace to do the following:
Have pages on the website that both explain the process of adoption and fostering with Jax and implement forms onto the website for people to send in to express interest in the dogs available.
Spread the mission of Jax by creating Success Stories and telling the story of Jax
Link to Social Media platforms that contain events, available dogs and how to donate
Strategic Thinking
We began planning out our journey with Jax’s Labrador Retriever Rescue by making ourselves familiar with their social media presence on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. We also tested various website design templates that we found on Squarespace in order to determine which looked the most visually pleasing. Our group then brainstormed ideas for a short, introductory video to include on the site, but ultimately had to alter our plans and produce alternate content in order to acquiesce the requests of our community partner. Moreover, our team communicated effectively with Jax’s organization to get a general idea of how they wanted the website to look, and we made sure to take all of these ideas and suggestions into consideration during the design process. Overall, the construction of the website focused on incorporating various emotional design practices and simple graphics in order to foster community engagement. We also made sure to use the #JaxLab and #TeamJax hashtags in our own documentation of the project to further promote the organization and draw attention to the importance of consistency on social media.
Results
Our final product for Jax’s Labrador Retriever Rescue is an engaging, resourceful, and visually pleasing website created using the SquareSpace application. Our team worked diligently to construct an effective site through the use and implementation of gathered research on best social media and web design practices. We ultimately focused on compelling storytelling through the employment of various emotional design methods. In addition, we narrowed down the preferred audience by deciding on who the organization should target based on similar animal rescue organizations that already exist in the Philadelphia area. Moreover, we decided to include elements of ‘play’ into our design in order to set up a humanistic feel and a sense of relatability among the organization and the consumers. All and all, each section of the website was designed with consistency, purpose, and raising awareness in mind.