Social Toaster, LLC Launches Redesign of WYPR Website

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – (February 23, 2011) – Social Toaster, LLC, a development firm that creates software solutions for social marketing, is pleased to announce that it has redesigned the website for one of Maryland’s most prominent news organizations. Known as Baltimore’s NPR news station serving Maryland, the mission of WYPR is to broadcast programs of intellectual integrity and cultural merit.  Officials at WYPR believe their new website will help them to further this mission because it incorporates sweeping and comprehensive changes into a fresh new design creating a site with increased functionality, usability, and social marketing capabilities.

The new look and feel of the wypr.org conveys the feeling of openness and transparency in reporting.  Vibrant blue and green hues complimentary to the station’s logo take center stage on the homepage.  The news feed is now easier to navigate, and has a greater ability to showcase pictures across its more visually appealing landscape.  Additionally, the site allows for ease of navigation to find important information like upcoming events.

An upcoming feature of the site is integration with OpenCalais, a solution that uses natural language processing to identify key entities within general text content, and to then automatically assist in categorizing that content and relating it to other content both on the WYPR website and elsewhere on the web.

“We feel that this redesign changes the user experience and allows visitors to access NPR content differently for expanded world and national coverage,” said Anthony Brandon, General Manager of WYPR.

The redesign is built upon SocialToaster’s CivicToaster platform, which is comprised of the Drupal Content Management System, SocialToaster (a software solution for social marketing), and the CiviCRM Constituent Management System.  Together, these three components provide greater nonprofit management capabilities, including the ability to collect online donations, membership recruitment and sign up, calendar and event registration and fundraising.    

SocialToaster has been incorporated into wypr.org for the purpose of growing the organization’s Facebook Likes and Twitter followers, as well as furthering awareness about WYPR, encouraging more of the news station’s devotees and their contacts to engage with the organization in the social space.  SocialToaster will do this by engaging supporters to promote content directly to their social networks, driving website traffic and providing comprehensive reporting on the effectiveness of the social campaign efforts.  To introduce SocialToaster to its listeners, WYPR has launched an initial campaign to recruit Ambassadors, or people who believe in the WYPR brand, to sign up on its website and agree to share its message using their social networks.

“We are quite pleased and honored that the digital media department and top executives at WYPR chose Social Toaster, LLC to be the development firm to give WYPR.org its new distinctive look and feel, and upgraded functionality,” said the firm’s CEO, Brian Razzaque. “We highly regard WYPR as thought leader for news that engages and informs communities in this region.  And we are equally excited that the software solution for social marketing that we created, SocialToaster, will help further the organization’s mission of developing programs of intellectual integrity and cultural merit across the social landscape.”

***

For more information on SocialToaster, click here.