Let’s address the elephants not in the room

They are happily retired in the wild

An elephant walking through a grassy field at the sanctuary

What we did

A new brand, and a site the staff could run themselves

The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee is a non-profit that gives aging elephants a home and individualized care, most of them retired from zoos or circuses. Alongside that work it runs community outreach and wildlife conservation education, raising public awareness of what elephants need in captivity and of the crisis facing elephants in the wild. Dozen handled the branding, the design, and the development.

The old site was getting in the way

Every change was slow, and the staff had little control.

When we met the Sanctuary, one of their biggest challenges was an outdated website that was time-consuming and cumbersome to update, and that gave the staff only limited control. They had a strong need for a brand refresh as well. As a non-profit surviving on donations, they needed to engage the donors they had and cultivate a younger audience to grow and maintain the sanctuary. Our goal was fresh, modern branding and a new site that allowed easy, frequent content updates, along with comprehensive control over their most engaging feature of all: the EleCam, a real-time video stream of the elephants living in their natural habitat.

Their photography, given room

Clean, bold type and a sitemap anyone can follow.

The Sanctuary gave us fantastic photography, and the design leans on it, paired with clean, bold typography, to tell the story of the elephants and their life in Tennessee. With a wealth of content to display and a real variety of people coming to see it, we worked with the Sanctuary to organize the sitemap carefully into meaningful channels of content. The site is now easy to navigate whether you are a family, an educator, or an avid EleCam viewer.

The Elephants page on the Sanctuary site: a full-bleed photograph of an African elephant with the word Elephants set over it, and Current Residents listed below

The Sanctuary home page: two elephants in a wooded pasture under the headline Celebrating 30 Years Providing Home & Herd

By the numbers

+178% Page view increase
3.5M EleCam viewers since 2016
+14k Facebook likes

Built for the custom parts

A Laravel build the staff could run, and a live stream that had to hold up.

Given the amount of custom functionality the site required, we built it on Laravel with a custom publishing layer, for ease of scalability and custom feature development. Laravel is a mature platform that lends itself to rapid development of reliable applications, which particularly fit this client given their financial constraints. It also let us integrate HD Relay, the live streaming service that powers the EleCam.

The EleCam page, offering three live camera views of the elephants with a Watch Now button under each

What changed

The people closest to the work could finally publish it.

Through the site the Sanctuary has been able to promote fundraising campaigns far more actively, and those efforts have had a lot of success. We gave the client, particularly the non-technical folks, an interface that is easy to use and easy to understand for actively managing the content on the site.

That was revolutionary for the Sanctuary. As a result they were able to hire a content manager to actively promote the organization through the site in near real time, and the feedback from the Sanctuary’s dedicated followers on social media and marketing channels has been incredible.

What our clients say