Sierra Club’s Water Sentinels educate the public, train volunteers, and lobby for protective standards and regulations at every level.
As a volunteer, I support the National Water Sentinels leadership team with graphic design and updates to their Drupal website.
Website Updates
One aspect of our work that I am proud of is the addition of a sub-menu structure and dedicated subcommittee pages to an existing website.
From the landing page, we created new content and gave it a new structure:
- Water Sentinels
- About Our Work
- Water Affordability
- Water Quality Monitoring
- Western Waters
- Get Involved
- Resources
The addition of the sub-menu to the landing page conveys the degree to which our team is organized for a clear purpose. Each subcommittee has its own explanation of problems, solutions, a vision, and a mission pertaining to their selected focus. The new menu system allows a viewer to quickly scan team activities so they can find volunteer work that interests them.
A new phase of the project included moving their website content to a new Grassroots Network framework within the SierraClub.org website, as well as the creation of a blog to archive newsletters.
E-newsletter
Another aspect I am proud to share is the first edition of the Water Sentinels newsletter.
This project was organized by a committee of the leadership team. Along with another marketing volunteer, we created a content submission form and invited members of the Water Sentinels to contribute their activist stories.
We had a handful of choices for platforms to create and send the e-newsletter. In the end, we opted to use a Google Site for the visual layout and we used the existing Sierra Club’s Salesforce email marketing platform to share a letter of introduction and the link to read the e-newsletter. It was sent to roughly 400 email subscribers.
I designed the visual formatting from scratch and included some of my western waters nature photos from cross-country train trips. Our other volunteer compiled, edited, and prepared the narrative content that I inserted to the visual design.
Click the banner to see our first edition as a Google Site, and then take a look at the newsletter’s permanent home on our Drupal website as a blog.
