Dyson Foundation Launches New Website

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Emphasizing Ease of Use and Improved Efficiency

The Dyson Foundation is pleased to present our new website. Its launch follows an extensive exploration into the use of technology as a means of delivering information, and we hope our findings will be of benefit both to nonprofits and other area funders.

As part of this process we challenged ourselves with several questions. What is the primary function of our website? Who are our principal users? How can we make their experience easier and more pleasant? How can we use developments in technology to become more efficient, both in how a website is navigated, and in our own administration? And how can we use the web to deliver critical information?

Weighing all of these questions and many others, we embraced the task of developing a website that could manage large amounts of information but still feel simple to use. Among the results is the Grantmaking control panel you will find on every page, which makes it possible for grantseekers or grantees to navigate to any part of the website they need in one or two clicks. Grantmaking is our business. The more efficient we can make it, the better for all involved.

Efficiency came into play in many aspects of developing the new site because we realized that we could tie our web technology into our administrative process. As a result, each of the following processes became easier for website visitors to use and for our office to manage.
  • Online Eligibility Questionnaire – We have rewritten the questionnaire to match our current guidelines and made it prominent to encourage grantseekers to determine their eligibility for Dyson Foundation funding themselves. This saves time for them and for us.
  • Online Letter of Inquiry – We encourage grantseekers to use the online letter of inquiry for multiple reasons. It saves paper, saves time, is the fastest means of reaching us, and helps us administratively by providing us with pre-entered, database-ready content.
  • Online Annual Reports – Current reports are available as interactive and searchable websites, and previous Annual Reports dating to 2001 can be found as PDFs. In eliminating printing, we save paper, time and cost.
  • Grants Search – We expanded our online search to include both recent and historic grants while allowing for greater integration of our office systems with the website.
On the whole we discovered that the pace of technological development on the web has resulted in impressive technologies that can improve both how you present and manage your information, and that these technologies are now extremely cost effective. The Dyson Foundation encourages area institutions, nonprofit and funders alike, to stay aware of these technologies, considering how they might benefit your organizations, and by extension the communities you serve.

We welcome your comments. The web is an ever-evolving medium and websites have a dynamic role. Our goal is that ours serve as the best resource it can.