Sharing environmental organizing knowledge beyond one community
Community environmental work often involves more than identifying an issue. Organizers need practical material to bring people together, understand local conditions and plan what to do next. Guides and worksheets can be valuable, but only if another group can find the right resource when it needs it.
Oregon Environmental Council has worked to protect the state’s air, water and land since 1968. As part of its organizing and diesel-emissions work, it had accumulated training documents and processes that could help partners in other communities. The organization wanted a dedicated online toolkit that made those resources easier to browse and use.
SLIDEFACTORY was responsible for wireframing, designing and developing the WordPress site in 2019. We structured its knowledge archive around the material itself, then returned in early 2020 to add a guided quiz for visitors who weren’t sure where to begin.
Organizing the materials around how people use them
We began with OEC’s training documents and brand material, arranging them into a site blueprint before drawing the homepage, archive and individual-resource templates. Design reviews refined the homepage, after which the same visual direction was applied to the rest of the site using OEC’s photography.
The WordPress build treated each resource as a structured content item, with custom fields, categories and tags rather than relying on a loose collection of PDF links. The knowledge archive included filters and navigation to narrow resources by subject and type. A separate process page explained implementation, methodology and partnership, and the site also included testimonials and featured-content fields that staff could maintain themselves.
The team moved from its initial blueprint to a working site build in roughly three weeks in July 2019.
Helping visitors find a starting point
By early 2020, OEC wanted to give visitors another way into the material. Someone approaching the toolkit with a specific community situation might not know which module to open first. We designed the flow of a short quiz and implemented branching questions that led to different resource recommendations.
The quiz used the visual system already established for the toolkit. We finished this second phase with site logo updates in March 2020.
Making the toolkit easier to enter and explore
Oregon Environmental Council’s toolkit brought organizing materials into a structured WordPress archive, where visitors could filter resources by topic and type instead of searching through scattered documents. The subsequent quiz added a second route through the content, asking visitors about their situation and pointing them toward a relevant set of materials.
The site reached a working build in July 2019, and the quiz followed in early 2020. Across the two phases, the available records cover roughly 96 hours of work. More importantly for the toolkit itself, the archive and guided questions gave organizers two practical ways to navigate OEC’s material and find a place to begin applying it in their own communities.
