Teaching Tolerance

Enabling educators to foster a kind and inclusive school climate.

Teaching Tolerance – a program of the Southern Poverty Law Center – is dedicated to educating young people to be active participants in a diverse democracy. Educators often have to respond to issues of intolerance at a speed and scale that can be incredibly challenging. News travels quickly, students form opinions and harbor fears, and teachers can feel isolated when trying to make sense of these issues for themselves and their students.

Challenge

Teaching Tolerance needed their site to enable rapid generation and dissemination of new materials, while also surfacing valuable content from the past that has renewed importance in today’s news cycle.

Solutions

ThinkShout integrated two previously isolated sites into custom lesson plans, deep content library, and guided Learning Plan Builder that makes all of Teaching Tolerance’s content classroom-ready.

Results

Tolerance.org has experienced huge gains in registrations, return visits, and sessions. The site was also a Webby Award Finalist.

Our approach to design was to provide an experience without barriers. Regardless of whether a user is on their phone while taking the train to work or on their desktop at home, they should be able to easily access all resources as well as use them to build learning plans using the step-by-step process. We wanted a streamlined experience, with everything from magazine articles, lessons, texts, and professional development materials to be easily digestible, searchable, and, most importantly, offer the ability for users to build a plan off of them as they discovered valuable resources.

We took the current Tolerance brand and refreshed it to accommodate a modern, content-rich site. While sticking with their current brand’s foundation, we explored colors and typography treatments that would allow for a design that supports (rather than overshadows) the robust content offered. Tolerance also has a beautiful, vast library of photography, and are continually creating timely and engaging illustration. Those elements drive the core visuals of the site.

Exploring rich colors on a tablet, portrait mode.

Exploring rich colors on a tablet, landscape mode.

But a website is only as successful as the engagement it sparks. Educators are in a constant struggle to keep up with the pace of the world in which we live, all the while ensuring that they meet the standards of their local school districts.

That’s what lead to the creation of “The Moment,” a branded publishing platform that surfaces the most important content in response to cultural events. Whether the content is from five years ago or five hours, users get the best that Teaching Tolerance has to offer. And, by linking this content up to the organization’s email communication strategy, we ensure that teachers get the materials in their inbox before they know they need it.

Now users can craft unique learning plans and share them with peers in their own schools or across the country. Over time, as the online community grows, we hope to build more social tools for teachers to share, comment on, and learn from each other’s work; work that ultimately fosters a more inclusive and kind environment in our schools.

+50%

increased registrations

+22%

increased return visits

+27%

increased session duration

Launch Site