A maze of military regulations made easy.

Mom2Mom Global is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization that provides advocacy, education, and practical resources for parents who are breastfeeding while enlisted in military service.

They are a passionate, organized, and efficient group of moms on a mission. And they were an absolute pleasure for us to collaborate with!

When they contacted us for a new Squarespace website design, Mom2Mom Global’s needs had begun to outgrow their existing clunky WordPress website, and their original developer was nowhere to be found. Their web presence needed an update to keep their connection with their audience feeling fresh and relevant.

Like so many other nonprofit clients we’ve worked with, Mom2Mom Global needed to re-launch a website that would create a clear journey for several different categories of website visitors:

For the lactating military parents that they serve, Mom2Mom Global needed a resource hub that included large volumes of information about military breastfeeding and infant care policies, downloadable signage, and tips about relevant products and services offered for free or covered by health insurance. These visitors also needed to be able to quickly find their nearest M2MG chapter.

For site visitors who want to serve as lactation consultants on US military bases across the world, they needed a promotional tool for marketing their online certification course.

For those interested in supporting or participating in advocacy and education efforts, the website needed ways to help build engagement with prospective volunteers and other supporters of Mom2Mom’s cause. Even better if these offerings result in some extra revenue!

So, we needed to craft clear messaging for three different main audiences, with a user experience that would satisfy the intentions of each of these types of website visitors at all device sizes. We also needed to house huge amounts of detailed information, while avoiding creating more frustrating dead-end click loops or impenetrable walls of text.

In order to help the website begin to perform in search engines, we also prioritized resolving all the big legacy SEO problems – messy URL slugs, poorly structured header and page text content, and missing meta-data – that tend to occur when different volunteers have been updating the website with no standard procedure in place. The site was also difficult to navigate, with many confusing dead ends.

Finally, we needed to provide Mom2Mom Global staff with enough training to avoid these troubles in the future, and to help ensure that the new website remains a useful tool for years to come.

In our initial content strategy meeting with Mom2Mom Global’s media team, we walked through all the UX mazes of the old website, categorizing the types of information that needed to make it to the new site. We then created a new site outline together, centered around the journeys of the three main audiences we had identified, and eliminating all the unnecessary complexities of the old site’s architecture. We also planned a total overhaul of the website’s on-page search engine optimization (SEO).

Perhaps the most important area to improve with a better user experience and SEO was the Breastfeeding in Combat Boots resource hub.

In this collection, each branch of the military has a dedicated page with links and references to everything a parent might need to know about breastfeeding while on active duty. On Squarespace, we gathered these pages into a Portfolio collection to take advantage of the dynamic landing page that Mom2Mom Global staff could add to on their own, while still having access to more design tools than we could use with a regular blog.

Knowing that service members may benefit from being able to access these specific branch pages from Google directly, we also provided careful coverage of the most relevant keywords, and we included some extra internal links to help pull casual researchers deeper into the website. Each of these service branch pages features an accordion that collapses the policy information by category, as well as a sidebar of ad-like links that a newcomer might be interested to click – like how to get a free breast pump.

Other features on the new site include:

• An improved blog that multiple staff members are successfully maintaining with uniform procedures that we taught them – even down to the SEO details! (We absolutely love to see this.)

• A large directory page of Mom2Mom Global chapters around the world

• An online shop integration that provides totally passive income for the organization via Printful, a popular print-on-demand service

• A sales page that brings in new students for Mom2Mom Global’s popular Military Lactation Consultant certification course

• A private page for site admins with custom video tutorials about most common maintenance tasks.

We are delighted that our friends at Mom2Mom Global finally have a website that they feel proud to show off and confident enough to steer on their own.

Months after the initial launch of the site, the Breastfeeding in Combat Boots resource hub is by far the most visited secondary page, and many of those visitors arrive there directly from Google.

The website is now acting as a dynamic tool to connect Mom2Mom Global with their audience. The team is regularly posting search engine optimized news and updates on their own, effortlessly selling merch, and getting lots of traffic and engagement for such a niche audience. We’re so glad these efforts are paying off.