Chris Kindness Award — Voting Experience Rebuilt for Mobile
A lightweight WordPress rebuild focused on the nonprofit’s lifeblood: fast, frictionless voting and a homepage that instantly explains the mission.
Project Overview
Client: Chris Kindness Award (Nonprofit)
Platform: WordPress
Primary Goal: Smooth mobile voting experience
Secondary Goals: Clear and coherent site & homepage + faster site performance
Scope: UX + performance rebuild + admin workflow
Deliverables: Homepage, voting experience, nominees/winners structure, reporting via Google Sheets
The website was losing votes on mobile.
Mobile users are the majority of traffic—and the voting flow was failing. That doesn’t just hurt conversions; it creates fairness issues for finalists and blocks people from learning about causes in the moment (QR codes, social posts, on-the-go sharing).
Goals
What success needed to look like
Strategy
Reduce friction by eliminating slow, heavy loading, errors, and confusing voting steps.
Make mission obvious with a clear hero section that guides users to their next action with a clean and straightforward content hierarchy.
Make it operable with the creation of systems that a non-technical team can rely on.
The Solution
A Voting Experience Designed for All Devices
Mobile friendly and intuitive form flow:
Vote below? Meet the Finalists? Check out last month’s winner? All on the voting page.
UI that feels simple + welcoming and a clear next step after voting (no blank page / dead end)
Winners & Nominees Easy to Find
Clear navigation to winners and nominees/current voting make it easy to navigate to the most important part of the site, increasing voting numbers and traffic.
Lightweight WordPress Rebuild
Clean setup designed for quick loading and minimal blocking scripts, eliminating many users from bouncing from the site.
Clean structure so pages don’t “break” across updates
Homepage Rebuilt for Instant Understanding
The new hero considers almost all intentions when entering the website.
Many will enter the site to vote or nominate, and the buttons on the hero allow them to do just that. They also are immediately able to tell if voting is open or closed and when it opens if closed.
Image below (or on the right on desktop) that shows emotional impact of the nonprofit.
Admin system that non-technical members can run
“I like it because I always have to export and re-order.”
Nominations + vote counts feed into centralized Google Sheets
Team can review, sort, and manage without living in confusing WordPress
Performance Stats (Desktop)
PageSpeed Score
Total Blocking Time
First Contentful Paint
Speed Index
Qualitative Wins
- Voting no longer fails on mobile
- The organization is taken more seriously with a sleek and professional site.
- Visitors understand the nonprofit and get where they need to be quickly
- Team can manage data in Google Sheets instead of fighting exports
Before & After
What This Means
A nonprofit site should remove friction, not create it.
When the core action is voting, every extra second and every confusing step costs participation. The new site focuses on clarity, speed, and a system the team can confidently operate.