Cascades Academy

Catalyst for change

Cascades Academy is one of Bend Oregon’s highest ranked K-12 Independent Schools.  It offers a high quality,  experiential education which allows students to take control of their learning. After 20 years of growth, the organization wanted to re-brand to better fit their current status.

I was asked to join the team to help create their new brand and implement these changes onto their website through a full re-build. This entailed sweeping all pages on the existing site, working closely with stakeholders to ensure programatic accuracy, and designing a website that represents the future trajectory of the school.

Where it started

The Head of School, Julie Amberg, often joked about how it is impossible to portray everything that this small, powerful school accomplishes to its external constituents.

When looking at some factors that may have led to this joke, it became clear through Google Analytics that pages the admin team thought crucial to the school, were not receiving nearly as much traffic as expected.

Research

To start this project, I needed to understand what stakeholders thought was important about the school.

I interviewed 23 internal constituents of the school including: 

• Board Members
• Division Head Leads
• Teachers
• Current Parents

Within each interview I was looking to find: 

• What is the best part of this school?
• What makes this place unique? 
• Are we currently representing school values accurately? 

Results

The majority of people had very positive things to say about Cascades Academy. Stating that the best part of the school was the community and the programs offered through each individual division (Lower School, Middle School, Upper School).

Additional responses highlighted the importance of showing the programatic offerings within each division as well as making general information about the school at the forefront of the website. People also noted that the brand of Cascades Academy seemed out dated and clunky when looking at the (former) website.

Branding

Armed with user feedback and a clear direction of what to improve, I helped pull together a team to work on updated branding for the organization. As the organization grows, it was important that Cascades Academy kept its "secret sauce". The secret sauce in this case happened to be the place the school was nested, and the community that was formed around it.

The branding team focused first on an updated logo, drawing inspiration from the unique Central Oregon landscape and key parts of the former logo we were able to iterate on multiple designs before landing on our final design.

In order to land on a logo that all of our stakeholders thought represented the school, we needed to test multiple designs and various color schemes.

Here is what we landed on: 

In this new logo you can see the outline of the school's unique architecture nestled in front of the iconic Three Sisters Mountain Range. The Mountain Range don't just represent the location of the organization but also growth throughout its three unique divisions (Lower School, Middle School, Upper School).

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Now, ready with brand guidelines and eager to start working, I dove into the website rebuild and redesign!

Website Rebuild and Redesign

From here, it's a whirlwind of refining how we describe our offerings, the hierarchy of user flows, and redefining how we have previously navigated the site. This rebuild was not just about making the website look better; it's about solving problems that were not addressed and enhancing user experiences in order to better pave a path to where the organization wanted to be. Each decision, from the choice of navigation elements, to the placement of buttons and information architecture, is carefully considered to ensure that the end result is not only aesthetically pleasing but also functional and intuitive.

"Its a happy place that fosters a true love of learning."

Choosing a Direction

There are plenty of different design styles for Independent Schools. Utilizing the organizations resources through the National Association of Independent School's (NAIS) and Northwest Association of Independent Schools (NWAIS) I was able to identify themes and design styles that seemed to be working at high ranking schools.

Some of my design influence came from Sun Valley Community School's website. When talking to one of NAIS's board members this school was attracting a wide array of applicants and was considered one of the best websites in the Pacific Northwest.

Here are some features I wanted to emulate into Cascade Academy's rebuild: 

Measures of Success (KPI's)

Before starting to build my team and I needed to know what exactly success looked like. Having had this discussion at the beginning of the process roughly 3 months before, I thought it would be good to lay down some Key Performance Indicators (KPI's) to help measure our success.

• Increased enrollment
• Increased traffic on the following pages:
  • Homepage
  • Admissions
  • Division  (lower school, middle school, upper school)
  • Donation
• Static or increased page rank.

These KPI's will help guide future iterations of the site and are also measures of success for our Director of Enrollment, Director of Marketing, and Director of Business Operations.

Where the Wheel Hits the Ground

Having identified the general look and feel of the new brand, a direction for the website, and many stakeholder interviews to highlight the important parts of Cascades Academy's program it was time to build.

Utilizing Finalsite as my main CMS I was able to work in HTML and CSS to build a beautiful design that highlighted Cascades Academy in a new light.

After 3 months of researching, designing, and developing, Cascades Academy launched its website.

KPI Successes: 

• Increased traffic to each page by 35% - 40% within the first three months.
• Page rank did not change.
• Enrollment increased by 80% the following fall semester.

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