Inventive Cares Teams up With Mary Lee Foundation

Inventive Group’s overall mission is to improve people’s lives with technology. One of the many ways we have accomplished this is through our nonprofit organization, Inventive Cares. 

As part of our social mission, Inventive Group donates 2% of all sales revenue to our charitable giving budget. These funds are used by our non-profit, Inventive Cares, for building websites for non-profit organizations and providing scholarships for Inventive Academy.

In 2019, Inventive Cares had the opportunity to serve the Mary Lee Foundation by rebuilding their website.

Mary Lee Foundation’s mission is to serve adults with special needs so that they may develop a sense of dignity, a sense of self worth, and the skills necessary to socially integrate with and contribute to the community in which they live. When asked to help curate a newer, disabled friendly website, Inventive Cares quickly jumped on the opportunity as their service project for the year.

The Mary Lee Foundation was running on an existing wordpress site. Unfortunately the site was unorganized and not user friendly. Being a website that specializes in information for the disabled, it was difficult to read and navigate. After auditing their site, we quickly realized that the system itself was over 8 years old and existing templates were no longer supported. We wanted to keep the original CMS on WordPress, but give the site a fresh update. After installing the new site in a better environment, we installed a new builder that allowed us to update the site and easily add new pages. We wanted to maintain a new modern design without all the usual complications, making it as user friendly as possible. We had to ensure the site was user friendly enough so that Mary Lee Foundation could continue building without development help from Inventive.

To this end, we used a builder called Divi, which is powerful and easy to use. Divi offers drag and drop functionality throughout the site to help add images, text, and colors. We created a library of templates so that Mary Lee Foundation could continue adding to their site. Because Mary Lee Foundation serves the disabled community and those with brain injuries, we had to ensure the new site would be ADA compliant. The colors we implemented in our design were specialized and the font was larger and easier to read.

We were happy to give Mary Lee Foundation a fresh start, with all the tools needed to support and maintain their site. So they could maintain and add new content to their site, we prepared them with in-person training and video tutorials. Product owner and Business Manager for the Mary Lee Foundation, The Product owner and Business Manager for the Mary Lee Foundation, would be managing the site after we launched. We wanted them to feel empowered and in control when it was time to move forward from the project.

Mary Lee Foundation does so much for those in the disabled community. We loved being able to work with them and reorganize their content to make it ADA compliant. Now anyone that wants to access this site, whether they are looking for housing or employment, can find the information they need with ease.