The British Red Cross has launched a new website to make it easier for people to find what they are looking for and access support.
It has been nearly seven years since the charity last had a major refresh of its website, although it successfully launched a new donation platform last year before starting work on the rest of the site.
Since launching the fundraising platform the charity has seen an uptick in the the number of people donating by mobile and tablet devices.
There has been a 17.5 per cent increase in the number of people completing donations on mobile devices and a 12.4 per cent increase in tablet donations.
The website is the charity’s main digital channel. Rosie Slater-Carr, chief information officer at British Red Cross, told Civil Society News that the charity’s ethos is to “connect human kindness to human crisis” and and that the new website is expected to help people engage with what the charity does and access services better.
‘Make it as easy as possible'
Slater-Carr, told Civil Society News that the main aim was to make it “as easy as possible” for people coming to the site.
She said that around a quarter of the old site's 4,000 pages had not been looked at in over year, and a lot of visitors were leaving after visiting the homepage, suggesting that “people couldn’t find what they needed”.
The aim of the new site is to make it “as easy as possible for people to get the help they need”.
It was also “absolutely critical” for the site to work on mobile as well, “because that's how people often prefer to read websites”.
As well as the new site a lot of the content has been refreshed, with Slater-Carr working closely with the charity's executive director of communications, Zoe Abrams.
New features planned
The British Red Cross appointed design agency Rufus Leonard in last summer and launched the first iteration of the new site on schedule last week.
Slater-Carr attributes the success to working very closely with agency. People from the charity's IT team were seconded into the agency to work as a "joint team", and have "come back having learned brilliant skills".
The plan now is to do “fortnightly releases of smaller improvements” and beginning adding digital elements to its services, such as making it easier for people to do things like borrow a wheelchair.
The charity also plans to measure the new site's success and respond to user feedback. As a result, every page has a ‘Was this page helpful?’ button.
|
