AccountAbility Minnesota
AccountAbility Minnesota provides free tax preparation, plus other financial services, to low-income people in the Twin Cities. They also partner with churches and other agencies in Greater Minnesota to support free tax prep in the rest of the state. Because of their work, over 17,000 taxpayers each year get the refunds they are due, without exorbitant fees or tricks that happen all too often in the for-profit tax preparation industry.
They’re a well-run nonprofit group with 500+ volunteers putting in over 10,000 hours each tax season. But AAM’s out-of-date website didn’t reflect their professionalism or meet the needs of their customers, staff or volunteers.
Triangle Park Creative worked with AAM’s staff to determine the best structure for their site, including private areas for sharing information with volunteers and partner organizations. We then designed the new interface and built the site in Drupal so they would have content management ability on every page in the site.
Other features:
- An interactive map with filters to allow customers to find a tax site that offers the services they need (such as language interpreters, rapid refund loans, or the ability to open a savings account)
- A calendar that allows for individual events and also combines all the tax clinic listings on a given day into a single calendar listing, then lets the user pick a clinic from a list. The calendar also includes private events that are visible only to volunteers or partners.
- Expandable FAQs available at the end of any page where they’re needed.
- The site includes iFrames created by AAM’s third-party donor management system.
The final key feature AAM needed was the ability to display the whole site in Spanish, since a significant part of their customer base is more comfortable in Spanish than English. Using Drupal’s internationalization module, we configured the site with a language switcher. Each page can have a translated version (supplied by AAM), as needed (if the page is not translated, it will show up in English). In the end, it’s almost like two sites in one.