TruFund: A Lúgh Studio Case Study

Small businesses often require outside financing to get started. 

Unfortunately, like in many areas of life, the financial service sector often discriminates against more disadvantaged communities. This makes securing funding for minority business owners particularly difficult, and perpetuates unfair distribution of wealth in companies.    

TruFund’s Mission

This is the context in which we started working with TruFund in February of 2021.

TruFund’s mission is “to help historically disadvantaged individuals and communities create thriving and resilient small businesses.” The purpose behind this mission is to close racial and economic disparities in order to ensure a more equal society. 

While TruFund was already making great progress towards this enviable goal when we started working with them, they also realized that to have the greatest impact, they needed to step up their digital game.

Three Stumbling Blocks at TruFund

While discussing their short and long-term goals, TruFund expanded upon their ambitions to us. 

They had an action plan to achieve concrete goals in their industry, but knew they had certain stumbling blocks that were preventing them from getting there.

After initial discussions with TruFund leadership, these were the three main problems we identified:

1. An uninviting and underperforming website
2. A user experience that needed improvement
3. No connection between their national coverage and individual markets

It was time to get started!

Actions and Results

1. An uninviting and underperforming website

Action: Our first action was to gain inspiration from other websites. To do that, we looked at the online assets of other organizations in the nonprofit industry, as well as took notes on the website format of financial institutions like Goldman Sachs and Northern Trust.

This combination of input allowed us to effectively modernize TruFund’s website redesign while still staying true to their values.

We then got started with wireframes so our design team could work in parallel with development. This allowed us to come up with ideas, test them out, and then implement them immediately. This process made it possible to stay on course and hit our production schedule even faster than planned.

Result: TruFund’s new website both looks and performs better than ever before. Creating engaging and effective websites is what we at Lúgh Studio love to do… and we were glad to help!

2. A user experience that needed improvement

Action: We put together a list of fixes that needed to take place for a solid user experience, as well as a timeframe for making them happen.

We first started with the site’s overall disconnect in navigation. A basic dropdown menu didn’t accurately reflect where the user went upon clicking, there were inconsistencies in the call-to-action buttons, and it was generally easy for a user to get lost on the site.

We addressed these issues by implementing a dropdown “mega menu” that clearly mapped out the navigation, as well as adding “breadcrumbs” near the header to give the user an easy-to-follow tracker of all possible actions.

In addition, the old website wasn’t responsive on mobile devices, which caused problems for anybody not on a desktop. After some fixes and plugin updates by our development team, this was a problem of the past.

Result: The user experience on TruFund’s new site is fast, helpful, and informative. This helps TruFund better serve the people that need them and gives potential clients incentive to visit. 

3. No connection between their national coverage and individual market

Action: With an organization as large as TruFund, it’s no surprise that they serve people all across the country. To reflect that, we needed to set up their website to more accurately display their target markets.

To this end, we created a landing page for each main market and tested it via Figma. This made navigation between TruFund markets much more intuitive. In addition, we created a site on a staging server and did extensive user testing to ensure that each state’s page functioned perfectly. 

Result: TruFund now makes it very clear who they serve. Minority small business owners can now find information applicable to them quickly and easily, thus bringing TruFund closer to its overall mission. 

Conclusion

We at Lúgh Studio are honored to have worked with such an influential organization.

As a result of their cooperation with us, TruFund is now able to internally add new content and components to their website. This streamlines their online processes and allows them to grow independently with a scalable website.

Of all the benefits TruFund has gained by working with Lúgh Studio, this is the one we are perhaps most proud of!

Are you a nonprofit or small business looking for help on your website? Give us a shout! We provide a free consultation. Email us at info@lughstudio.com or call us at (718) 855-1919!