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"The new website both personifies and presents the YMCA of San Francisco in a clear and concise way... There is no doubt that the new website will significantly improve our ability to communicate with our members, donors, and stakeholders."
- Chuck Collins, President and CEO
YMCA of San Francisco
November 20, 2009
Emerge Interactive is proud to join with our partners at Hot Studio in announcing the launch of a new website for the YMCA of San Francisco. For 156 years the YMCA of San Francisco has been changing lives and serving their local communities with engaging programs and vital services. With 14 different branches throughout the Northern California Bay Area, YMCA-SF provides health and wellness programs and services to underserved local communities while targeting at-risk youth, the isolated elderly, and new immigrants struggling to adjust to their new community. The new website provides the renowned not-for-profit organization with an extremely powerful yet simple to use set of digital tools to express their story online and allows visitors to get the latest information on programs and news in a clean, easy to use manner.
Emerge's design partner Hot Studio developed a user centered design, custom color palette for each branch to express its own identity, while maintaining complete continuity between the YMCA-SF brand and rich user experience.
Emerge Interactive provided the technical engineering work and the integration of their WebActiveTM Enterprise-class Content Management System (CMS), which allows the YMCA-SF staff to easily make changes and updates to the content of their site in minutes.
A new WebActive component that was debuted with this site was the ability to create and manage multiple micro-sites. This innovative feature allows individual branches to control and update the content of their own sites, while news, events and other content assets can be seamlessly shared between all the branches and the headquarters home site.
The YMCA-SF's own IT department was a full partner in this project. Their participation allowed Emerge and Hot Studio to create a branch-by-branch schedule of classes and programs that can be filtered by age group, type of program, facility or time of day. All of this information is managed using the Y's existing program management infrastructure, which they can now make available to the public without any additional work by the staff.
