Lakota People's Law Project Action Center / A Case Study by Cosmic / Cosmic

For Action Centers we design, we strive to reduce complexity, focus on single actions, minimize distractions, and drive people to increased post-action engagement.

When people arrive at the homepage, they are presented with a grid of issues central to the LPLP mission. From there, it’s one click to a current action — an efficient way to increase engagement.

Visitors in a learning mindset can scroll down and see how to donate, discover successful actions, and find other ways to get involved.

The New York Times listed, “...the Lakota People’s Law Action Center…” as one of the factors in getting President Biden to nominate Native American Deb Haaland to lead the Interior Department.

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The Action Center is built around the idea of moving people to become increasingly active and committed. Move empathetic observers to become participants. Transform one-time donors into sustaining donors. Get donors to become vocal advocates and activists. Use the resources provided to spread awareness and fundraise.

To minimize complexity and maximize the experience, we used wireframes to nail user flow before designing pages. The process enabled us to gain clarity around the goals of the Action Center and efficiently execute during the design and development phases.

The design of the Action Center takes supporters quickly to actionable items, minimizes friction, and ensures seamless interaction with donation flows, both on desktop & mobile. We limit the steps to get to donation pages and avoid clutter once someone arrives. On action pages, we minimize distractions that might cause them to drop off.

When someone completes an action, additional actions and learning opportunities are automatically presented, including crossover options to discover other programs run by their parent organization — the Romero Institute. The curated experience keeps track of actions taken and doesn’t resurface completed actions.

Built using JAMStack and a Craft front end/CMS, the Action Center is integrated with the EveryAction fundraising and engagement platform. This allows LPLP to gain insights on what a visitor has already viewed & donated. Together, JAMStack and Craft provide an easy to use backend experience for content creators that requires little maintenance.

The Action Center allows LPLP to embrace a more linear fundraising strategy. Fundraising is based on specific actions rather than a general funding approach.

Because they can quickly deploy new campaigns, they can request donations at different steps of a campaign over an extended period of time. The Action Center also provides paths to convert people into Recurring Donors and give in other ways.

Opportunities abound throughout the Action Center to increase engagement and easily share actions that lead to wider reach. The LPLP team has learned that giving supporters tools to increase awareness can be as — or more — effective than running an annual awareness campaign.

The overall communication strategy and online experience was developed with the LPLP team to bring best practices to bear when creating and executing campaigns.

In order to engage people referred by a current supporter, each campaign page has a primary action, related impacts, and a history of the ongoing action and accomplishments so far.

The Action Center is our second project with the Lakota People’s Law Project. Previously we refreshed their brand as we designed and developed their website. We took that design language and ported it over to the Action Center, adding to the design system as needed.

We extended the button styles to include custom arrows based on traditional Lakota arrowheads.

New bold colored card styles were introduced placed in asymmetrical grids of images, articles, metrics, and data.

Videos that allow for deeper storytelling were incorporated into single issue action pages along with donate and petition signing pages.

In order to bolster social proof, carousels were built to allow for multiple testimonials without taking up vertical space.

Single lineweight icons used across the Action Center extend the existing family of icons and illustrations and also bring in additional cultural elements approved by tribal members.

We took a high-impact, minimal word approach to the copy and had to make every word count. The word choice is very precise and selections are made in an iterative and highly collaborative way.