LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT US:

We are building SeeYourImpact (SYI), a micro-charity network and partner platform. SYI will enable small donors to fund gifts of very specific items (e.g. a $15 braille kit/$18 mosquito net) to impact the causes they believe in. Donors get a personal impact story, in the form of pictures and videos, of the -actual person- who benefited from their donation.

The phenomenal success of the micro loans web site www.kiva.org (complementary to SYI micro charity focus) shows that the presence of a human connection can ignite a substantial number of small donations. This connection is the cornerstone of the SYI concept in the form of a visual human impact of each donation being delivered to each donor. A natural evolution is to enable end beneficiaries to be empowered to list their own needsa people based market place of charitable giving somewhat like EBay.

All of our work is being done on a volunteer basis so far, but we felt that a professionally designed theme would greatly help the project. Your design will entice donations and have an impact on areas of the world that desperately need help. Thank you for your effort!

HERE IS WHAT WE NEED:

We're looking for a template for the "home" pages (where we describe the network itself) as well as a template for charity-specific pages. The two templates should be visually related, but ideally there would be enough difference to let a visitor understand that the main page is a "whole network" view while the charity page easily supports charity-specific branding with minimal effort.

As all content (text/images) will be user-generated and regularly updated, it's not necessary to design specific graphics, except where they contribute to the general theme - for instance, header/footer or box elements. At this point we're focused on logos, color scheme, font selection, layout, etc.

The charity network page is actually the most important page, as we expect that at first most traffic will be driven by specific charity sites rather than through the network home page. This page serves as a template for the dozens (and later hundreds) of partner charities in our extended network. The purpose of this page is to make it as simple as possible to jump straight into the donation process.

The charity page should be slightly branded ("a member of the SeeYourImpact network") but we don't need to make our branding larger than the partners' own images, etc. We'll give our partners an opportunity to upload their own logo and/or banner depending on the selected design.

Both the charity and home pages have a set of additional sub-pages ("About Us", etc) that will be based on the same template. It's not necessary to explicitly design these pages, but we've included them in the attached mockups so you can take them into account.

Examples of our work in progress are live at:

* home page - http://charity.seeyourimpact.com

* charity pages - http://jyoti.charity.seeyourimpact.com or http://naftb.charity.seeyourimpact.com/

(The charity page matches our wireframe mockups, but the home page doesn't yet)

OUR TARGET AUDIENCE IS:

If the finished site would convince you to make a small donation to a cause, we've done our job!

WE LIKE THESE DESIGNS:

In general, our goal is to create an attractive but simple template that will work for a variety of causes. We appreciate the "web 2.0" aesthetic - less is more. Some specific design inspirations are listed inside the attached mockups.

We've included layout as part of our mockups, but those can be interpreted as you'd like. If your design looks better with a left sidebar, we can accomodate that. Feel free to play with the relative location or size of content boxes, etc.

WE ABSOLUTELY MUST HAVE (or we don't want to see) THIS IN OUR DESIGN:

The same charity template will be used for all partner charities. This means it must be general enough that with a few partner-provided photos, it can be something they're proud to show their donors. Imagine your design with photos uploaded straight from a camera...

Most of our major design elements (graphics, text) will be user/partner-generated. So we can't count on complex layouts that tie page elements together, rather we're looking for page templates that will make the user-generated content look its best.