St Christopher’s Fellowship
St Christopher’s Fellowship
Background
St Christopher’s Fellowship is a charity founded in 1870 to create brighter futures for children and young people. They work across the UK and Isle of Man providing children’s homes, supported housing, fostering and specialist support services, all designed for young people in care, on the edge of care, or leaving care.
Objective
St Christopher’s Fellowship original website did not do the organisation justice. Simple management of content and basic updates were proving problematic. The site did not truly convey all the brilliant work that St Christopher’s do, all the services they offer and all the people they help.
With clear disparities between what was required and what was on offer, St Christopher’s required a solid platform that provided support for all ongoing digital marketing work.
The new website needed to better communicate the organisational messages to carers and children as well as portray the charity’s mission through proper utilisation of their brand guidelines. Ultimately, the biggest task of all was to facilitate and improve the overall user experience for visitors to St Christopher’s website.
Approach
Given the objectives that needed to be met, the project followed a very thorough and methodical process from start to finish. We worked collaboratively involving a wide array of internal and external stakeholders, including children and foster carers.
There was a large amount of departmental cross-over with the digital marketing team, ensuring the end product worked from a lead generation perspective. This led to the creative direction being influenced by both primary and secondary research, resulting in the production of wireframes and subsequent high fidelity designs. For the build, WordPress was the perfect platform to use, given the objectives.
As an OpenSource CMS, we were able to scale the site beyond the limitations of the previous system, as well as integrating with a number of necessary third parties e.g. Charms Portal. The above approach allowed for the successful and timely delivery of the project, which post-launch is performing above and beyond expectations.