Charity Website |
St Catherine’s Hospice
Improved user experience and income generation for a local Hospice.
The Customer
St Catherine’s is the local hospice for Preston, Chorley and South Ribble. Their catchment includes 380,000 people, and their services touch around 2,000 patients and families each year.
It costs £5.6m to run St. Catherine’s every year. Out of this, the charity must raise £3.8m through a range of income generating activities including online donations.
The Challenge
A new website for St Catherine’s had to strike a careful balance. It needed to represent the charity’s core values and purpose, while also encouraging visitors to support the charity.
St Catherine’s also wanted the website to act as a valuable resource for patients, families and professionals, providing information and advice relating to chronic illness and palliative care.
In terms of functionality the website required ecommerce, CRM integration, online payment with direct debit and a user account section to record historical activity such as purchases and job applications.
Finally, it was essential that the website was built in a modular way that made it easy for St. Catherine’s to maintain and develop the website in the future.
Our Solution
To understand the expectations and requirements of each target audience we carried out a series of user workshops.
We then used this research to map the different user journeys against the website’s navigation and developed a mobile-first design to accommodate the needs of all audiences across all types of device.
The build required significant levels of functionality including user dashboard, ecommerce, event calendar, document repository, online payment, direct debit integration and a dynamic form builder.
The website was built on the WordPress platform and included a bespoke page ‘builder’ in the back office allowing St Catherine’s staff to easily add new pages, events and content.
Key Features
- Mobile-first design
- Page template and dynamic form builder
- Event calendar
- Customer account functionality and user dashboard
- Online payment gateway and direct debit integration
- Donorflex CRM integration
- ‘I want great care’ integration
- Ecommerce and lottery integration
- Charity shop directory and interactive map
- Fully optimised for search engines and performance
Impact
“We were looking for a website that would be highly functional, enticing to newcomers and one that really stands out from the crowd. Blue Wren were superb in helping us to achieve all those goals because they began with the user and potential user in all their thinking and design work.
Most importantly the company genuinely cared about our market, they wanted to help patients and families as much as we do. This led to an exciting and affordable top notch product. We are delighted to have chosen Blue Wren!”
– Stephen Greenhalgh, Chief Executive
