Background
BioLEAP began as a humane product loan program and help hotline. Its mission to help hasn’t changed, but the company has grown to better meet the needs of science educators. Nested as a program under NAVS (the National Anti-Vivisection Society) BioLEAP supplies grants for teachers to purchase animal dissection alternatives and offers free lesson plans to supplement the materials educators purchase.
Guided by the three Rs principle—an “aim to replace, reduce, and refine the use of animals in research, education, and testing,” BioLEAP has an overarching goal to foster a future generation of humane scientists, policy makers and citizens who use ethical science practices, especially through the adoption of their curriculum.
Approach
In order to create a website that would best provide educators with the information and tools they needed, BioLEAP enlisted Solid Digital to help streamline the process and clarify the benefits of dissection alternatives, better enabling educators to make budget-friendly and humane choices for their classroom.
But: The website’s product catalog—a compilation of products from other companies—was built more as an e-commerce site and didn’t provide background behind this newer science lab curriculum choice.
In addition to educating around the “why” behind choosing humane options, BioLEAP’s website redesign needed to:
- Promote and deliver all available program offerings;
- Enable future growth;
- Store and manage curriculum and interactive modules; and
- Clarify and streamline the product catalog
To support its efforts, BioLEAP also needed to be able to edit and maintain a site-wide CMS for that future growth, track the number of downloads, and add resources for website visitors including a blog, upcoming events, and recent news.
Strategy
In order to encourage adoption of humane science education offerings, BioLEAP’s website redesign (and upgraded web platform) had to accomplish their broader strategic objectives:
- Increase engagement with educators to widen curriculum use
- Showcase testimonials from educators using humane alternatives or BioLEAP curriculum
- Support expanded programming beyond the product catalog
In order to accomplish the objectives above, Solid Digital and BioLEAP worked together to achieve the following outcomes:
- Modernize Design: Refresh the look and feel of the website
- Enhance UX: User experience should be more engaging and user-friendly
- Social Proof: Content & messaging to include more testimonials & success stories
- Increase Lead Gen: Bring in more leads with gated content and compelling CTAs
- Optimize Product Catalog: Offer an intuitive, user-friendly product catalog
- Streamline Site Updates: Migrate to a CMS that allows for easy updating
Process
For Educators
First, to capture the interest of teachers and school administrators, BioLEAP focused on the value messaging of cost savings for educators and kept educators as their primary audience. In creating a streamlined site architecture, better pathways (initially created in Solid Digital’s sitemap) were carved out and the top nav was as simplified as possible, using only three main pathways: grants, products, and curriculum. The entire site was focused on educators, instead of confined to a single user journey or drop-down.
Also in the top nav, “Why make the Leap?”, caters to first-time visitors, identifying the host of benefits of dissection alternatives. Additional content around possible objections and immediate solutions offered by BioLEAP helped reassure inquisitive educators, laying out educator-reviewed standards met for classroom curriculum, a whitepaper with cost comparisons, and free lesson plans.
Beyond these resources, Solid Digital also focused heavily on displaying testimonials from teachers who have successfully used the products in order to help persuade others of the benefits.
New Catalog System
Second, to optimize the site’s product catalog, Solid Digital worked to improve the product browsing experience by creating four search filters: species, format, grade, and manufacturer.
Solid Digital’s development team migrated the existing catalog from the previous site, and polished the visual presentation, standardizing images with masking, simplifying pricing, and shortening descriptions to allow for easy scannability, while helping boost BioLEAP’s credibility and professionalism.
A Better Brand Identity
Because BioLEAP’s site is a basis for a future NAVS site, it was vital to establish a cohesive brand identity that distinguished BioLEAP but related back to its non-profit parent company.
In photography choices, Solid Digital chose more general science-education-related stock photos, connected to biology classroom learning. Product photography was accompanied by both animal icons as well as textures of animal fur and skin to add visual interest. Avoiding dissection and gore, the photos and textures came together to create more upbeat imagery to remind the user of the purpose of a more humane scientific method of learning.
Also of note: The grid shapes and patterns used throughout the website designed by Solid’s team—building blocks—echo back to dissection, bringing in the idea of taking something apart, and building it back up through education.
Clear the Pathway
In order to create clear journey paths, Solid Digital helped BioLEAP simplify the navigation, made resources easy to find, and clarified CTAs. Because BioLEAP is aggregating products rather than selling them, they identify the manufacturer and where to make a purchase in the CTA button in each catalog entry page.
Additionally, the grants page had to provide a solution with a pathway that could change—from “Apply for a Grant Now” to a mailing list sign up. Since grants are not always being accepted, the page is changeable to show a form for users to add themselves to a mailing list for grant notifications, eliminating a possible dead end on the grant page.
The Challenges
Providing gated content proved one of the trickier pieces of the project. With interactive modules that needed to be carried over, site migration was complicated by the structure of the modules and curriculum. Solid Digital customized BioLEAP’s workflow to allow users to sign up, and receive a time-sensitive link via email for access to the curriculum page. With a need to have the access time out after 30 days to enable time-sensitive updates and content control, Solid Digital created a workaround with a token to allow access for a limited time only.
The Results
Overall, BioLEAP is pleased with the futureproofed state of the site, which allows them to grow their catalog, improve their resources, and continue to be a destination for educators looking for dissection alternatives.
With curriculum effectively gated, messaging and resources tailored to educators, BioLEAP’s team can see their downloads grow and watch their mission for humane science expand with it.
