Dependency Advocacy Center (DAC) is a nonprofit in Santa Clara County, California, that works to keep families together. Parents at risk of losing their children to foster care get free legal representation, clinical social work, and support from Mentor Parents, people who went through the child welfare system themselves and came out the other side.
The Challenge
DAC first came to us with a practical problem. Their website was custom coded, and with no communications person in-house, keeping it up to date fell on the operations team, who had to edit the code themselves every time something needed to change. The original ask was a move to Squarespace so the team could manage the site without touching code.
Both DAC and our team saw the migration as the moment to rethink what the site should be doing. DAC is an organization built by lawyers, and by the team’s own admission, the site looked and read like a law firm. The copy was dense and legal in tone, so it didn’t speak to the audiences that mattered most, and the site had no SEO built in, so it wasn’t helping anyone find DAC who didn’t already know about them.
The Solution
We started with a diagnosis of the existing site, looking at how it looked, how it read and how it performed, and then conducted interviews with people who represented DAC’s Mentor Parents and recent hires, plus their fundraising expert.
Each audience came with its own difficulty. Donors often arrive with assumptions about why families lose their children, so the site needed to address those before asking anyone to give. Clients are usually reaching out in a moment of stress and needed clear, plain information on what DAC does and how to get help. Prospective hires were the audience the old site served best, so rebuilding meant paying close attention to not undoing what was already working for them.
From there we rebuilt the sitemap around audiences, with a homepage that works as an entry point for everyone and sections that go deeper for each group, and rewrote the copy in plain language with search in mind so people looking for the kind of help DAC offers can find them.
In parallel we refreshed the brand. Instead of starting over, we built it out from DAC’s existing logo, turning it into a full visual system that gives the site the warmth the old one lacked.
We built the new site in Squarespace, migrated DAC’s existing content, and set it up so the team can keep publishing on their own, with guidance on how to do it. We gave their impact data and financials a clearer place for donors and funders, treated accessibility as part of every design decision, and connected the integrations DAC needed, including donations, performance tracking (so they can now see how the site is doing) and Weglot, alongside manual Spanish translation work.
The Outcome
At handoff we gave DAC a plain-language guide to managing the site and walked the team through it live. The team who now runs the site found it straightforward and easy to use, and they’re already planning regular content for it. A few days after launch, Tomika (COO at DAC) wrote to say the staff love the new site.
DAC now has a site their own team can manage, performance tracking in place for the first time, and a brand kit they can use beyond the website.
See the new site live at sccdac.org.
