The Congressional Medal of Honor Foundation Website Redesign

Promoting Heroism and Inspiring Citizens

Foundation home page featuring a uniformed senior citizen hugging a grateful young girl with headline reading honor, value, legacy.

178%

Increase in Citizen Honors nominations

10X

Increase in website traffic since launch

4X

Increase in conversions

The Congressional Medal of Honor Foundation (CMOHF) honors the legacy of America’s greatest heroes. Part of their mission is to perpetuate the Medal of Honor’s legacy through outreach and collaborative efforts. These efforts include a values-based Character Development Program (CDP) for schools and Living History videos that tell the stories of Medal of Honor recipients in their own words.

The Challenge

Bringing Character Development into the Digital Age

The CMOHF lacked awareness and the ability to scale its brand to reach a younger audience. With a declining list of living Recipients, CMOHF was struggling to uphold its primary mission to perpetuate the values embodied in the Medal itself, enroll students in its Character Development Program and measure the program's effectiveness in improving students' lives. In addition, the Foundation sought to increase nominations for its annual Citizen Honors awards. CMOHF challenged Sagepath to deliver digital strategies that would reach new audiences and deepen the relationship with existing CDP participants.

Montage of smiling teens and child inspecting medal on Medal of Honor Recipient's neck.

Example of a page from the Congressional Medal of Honor Foundation website style guide showing colors, fonts and icons used on the site.

Our Approach

Creating a New Brand Architecture

The turnaround effort for CMOHF began with repositioning the brand and evolving it into an inspirational movement "to build a better nation one citizen at a time." Leveraging the positive values the medal represents as lesson plans for every American, Sagepath created a brand architecture including a mission, vision and positioning statement to support and promote the values of Courage, Sacrifice, Commitment, Integrity, Citizenship and Patriotism. We also built a new website from the ground up in Sitecore, creating a striking, new, contemporary design with enhanced features and functionality for fast and easy content updates.

Capabilities Used

Analytics
Content Strategy
Creative
Development
SEO
Strategy
User Experience

Three mobile phones, each displaying screens from The Medal of Honor.com, against a blue background.

Example of the medal of honor.com website content viewed on a tablet screen.

The Medal of Honor.com home page viewed on a tablet.

Improving the Lives of Teens

Our most significant contribution to the Medal of Honor's historic legacy has been to create LiveUp, a new program coming soon for youths aged 13-19 that promotes the core values exemplified in the Medal of Honor. Developed as a complement to the instructor-led Character Development Program, we worked closely with child psychologists and educators to create an online course of self-guided step-by-step lesson plans based upon more recent, relatable and modern-day topics. We are privileged to continue ongoing optimizations and content management to promote the legacy of America's heroes and the values they encompass.

The Results

A Site Worthy of America's Greatest Heroes

We delivered a fully responsive website that significantly increased brand awareness and fulfilled the Foundation's goal of maintaining the dignity and honor of our country's highest award for combat. The site has been honored by the Library of Congress, which has selected the website for inclusion in its web archives, citing themedalofhonor.com as the official history of the Medal of Honor and "an important part of this collection and the historical record.”