The Walton Family Foundation challenge
In 2017, the Walton Family Foundation set out to create a centralized and accessible platform to document and display the significant grants it had awarded to organizations focusing on its three pillars: K-12 education, environmental initiatives (specifically addressing water pollution), and community development in northwest Arkansas and the Arkansas-Mississippi Delta region. Since 1987, the foundation has been dedicated to making a positive impact on the world through philanthropy, and knew that displaying decades of its grants and their accompanying stories would speak to the Walton Family Foundation’s extraordinary impact.
To effectively communicate the remarkable work funded by the Walton Family Foundation, the foundation aimed to create a database and storytelling component. The new strategy also required a digital-asset management solution that could streamline the use and impact of media assets used in conjunction with written content. More broadly, the project required organizing and integrating grant records, project backgrounds and media assets from several decades and dispersed among different owners and locations.
The Brightspot solution for the Walton Family Foundation
The Brightspot team successfully transformed decades of grant data for the Walton Family Foundation into a comprehensive and fully-functional database. This included implementing new tagging and search options, enabling efficient organization and retrieval of information. By importing spreadsheets containing thousands of rows of grant recipient details dating back to 1989, the content management system (CMS) quickly processed and represented the assets.
This development allows the foundation to continue using its preferred method of data recording, utilizing shared spreadsheets, with the assurance that all information will seamlessly transfer to the CMS. In addition to the database, Brightspot assisted the foundation in creating a library of stories to showcase the outcomes of the various grants. This allows for visitors to put the full scope of the foundation’s work into context.
Managing image and video assets posed a challenge as these were dispersed across various years, computers and local drives. To address this issue, Brightspot implemented its Media Desk solution. With this robust, integrated digital-asset management solution to hand, the foundation is able to provide its publishers with the assets they need to effectively tell the stories of these transformational projects visually. In addition, grant recipients and volunteers can easily save and download assets in one centralized location, ensuring that valuable resources are archived and readily accessible and eliminating the risk of assets being misplaced or forgotten.
The outcome for the Walton Family Foundation
Brightspot addressed the Walton Family Foundation's key priorities with the help of its product, development and creative services teams. Highlights for the project included:
- The project exceeded priorities such as a quick time-to-market launch, a streamlined and efficient user experience, and site and CMS flexibility to support quick microsite build-outs, all within budget.
- Brightspot's Creative Content Services group contributed to the project with new visual design elements and a rationalized taxonomy to support a storytelling approach to the foundation's work.
- The project resulted in three heavily used sites by the organization: the main site, their digital-asset manager and an intranet providing helpful resources for all 150-plus employees.
- The Walton Family Foundation now has a single place to demonstrate and promote the work of its life-changing grants through a user-friendly grant database. It also enjoys a storytelling platform that allows them to raise awareness and drive engagement for its mission to make the world around it a better place.
Walton Family Foundation in brief
