In June 2003, the Cleveland Zoological Society launched its new web site www.ClevelandZooSociety.org in hopes of boosting online membership purchases, event tickets sales, and donations to various programs that support Cleveland Metroparks Zoo. With help from programmers (and web host) at Intersoft Group Inc., and designers from Nesnadny+Schwartz, our effort has been an incredible success.

Our Web sales for 2003 totaled $317,000!  That’s a 240% increase over 2002!

Our plan was to design an e-commerce module that catered to the distinctive needs of our non-profit organization. We had done a lot of research and hadn’t found the specific application we needed.  We succeeded in creating an online environment that welcomes both our $65 members and our $10,000 donors (and everyone in between).  It is visually appealing, secure, simple to use, and one of the most streamlined solutions we’ve seen yet.  We intentionally avoided the “shopping cart” setting, as we thought it essentially undermined our philanthropic goals. In addition to all of this, we designed the site to partner seamlessly with Cleveland Metroparks Zoo’s web site so that an 8 year-old searching for information on polar bears and an 85 year-old looking for information on estate planning can each find very different types of information easily across both sites.