Family Action
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Services
Stakeholder engagement & research
WordPress website
CRM integration
User Experience
Brand & Visual Identity
Industry
Charity
Health charities
IE designed and built a new user-centred website for the charity Family Action, making it easier for people to engage with the charity, whether they are looking for support or to give to the cause.
Family Action is an award-winning national charity working from the heart of local communities across England and Wales. They’ve been supporting people through change, challenge and crisis for over 150 years.
We all have our own family stories. Some are tougher than others. But the story of today doesn’t have to be the story of tomorrow, for any of us. Together, Family Action changes lives.
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Stakeholder engagement and research
Family Action was changing. The charity had previously only worked with families who had been referred to them by other organisations. In future, they wanted to allow service users to engage with them directly and ask for support. This also meant a shift in how they are funded, putting a greater emphasis on donations from people who wanted to help.
Before IE Digital arrived, the old Family Action website was really beginning to creak after 10 years of organic growth. There was no focused user journey and a wealth of uncatalogued inaccessible content.
They also needed to integrate two newly acquired services into the website, to support Family Action’s expanding portfolio. This meant bringing across their work in adoption and permanency support, and incorporating support for young people to improve their employability by finding opportunities to volunteer.
Discovery
For the new Family Action website, we prioritised redesigning the process for potential supporters to donate and support the charity in other ways.
This was a user-led process with a focus on delivering a slick user experience. We held stakeholder workshops to gather user needs and proposed a new site structure. This was then tested against 25 different tasks using TreeJack, before final adjustment of the information architecture based on our findings.
Next, we moved on to prototyping and designing the user interface in Figma, to bring the new brand personality to life and make the website more engaging for users.
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IE's expertise in building complex websites is second to none, we were blown away by their understanding of what we needed and the resulting vision for our website. In the back-end we have a technically complex website integrated with Salesforce, but to the user, it addresses their needs with simplicity and ease.
Wendy Garstin, Website Project Manager, Family Action
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Advise
User journey mapping
Right from the off, Family Action were keen that the project was as collaborative as it possibly could be, so we proposed a sprint-based, Agile development schedule that involved their key team at every turn.
We presented a series of recommendations for the project to Family Action:
Make it easier for your potential service users to discover and access your services
Stop publishing your complexity and describe yourselves in language your users with understand
Test your assumptions with real users
Give your users options and help
Make your many services easy to discover and understand
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Deliver
Beautiful, Salesforce-integrated website
To make the Familyline service more prominent, we added a pull down tag at the top of the site, showing all the ways to get in touch, as well as opening times and links to self-help resources.
CRM Integration
Family Action already used Salesforce CRM for some aspects of its fundraising journey. IE Digital implemented Salesforce more widely, acting as a single source of truth for a range of content and functionality.
The new website pulls data through from Salesforce via APIs, providing details for the various service pages. This makes it easier for people to search for the help they need, discover their local services through a new interactive map, and refer themselves for support. This also enables the individual services to manage the specific details for their locations.
Donation journeys and campaign management
A more extensive Salesforce integration also supported a step-change in Family Action’s fundraising. Where the old site only offered a single donation journey, we made it easy for the charity to include donation forms across the site. The team can embed a round trip donation process anywhere on the site, with tailored donation amounts to support and track specific campaigns and initiatives.
Other tasks became easier too, including event registrations, expressions of interest, and contact forms – all sending data to Salesforce and notifying the relevant teams.
For Family Action to engage more widely with service users and supporters, they needed to look less generic. The old comms and website were hard to differentiate from any other charity.
IE developed the new brand for Family Action, and brought the visual identity to life through the colourful new website. The playful designs use morphing shapes and photography to reflect how every family is different.
Content
The new website needed to house lots of different content types, including self help articles.
IE Digital introduced filtering and tagging of content and search, something that's fairly standard CMS functionality, but requires a consultative approach to catalogue content according to suitable categories, labels and tags.
Storytelling was also important and Family Action's rich case studies and impact statistics were incorporated throughout the site to demonstrate the difference the charity makes.
WordPress
The new WordPress CMS makes it far easier for the internal team to create and manage their content, using a page-builder approach and content ‘toolkit’. New publishing workflows support consistency across the site, overseen by the central team. Overall, the new site is more intuitive, highly accessible, and provides a seamless experience on mobile devices.
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Support
Tactical brand accessibility review
IE Digital hosts the new Family Action website through Pantheon and provides ongoing support, maintenance and hosting. Our dedicated helpdesk supports them with any issues or queries that arise through our dedicated ticketing system.
Before go live, we trained key website editors and provided ongoing support as they get to grips with the CMS. The site also went through our formal acceptance testing process to be declared ready for deployment and launch.
In preparation for this project, Family Action also asked IE Brand to refresh the charity's identity.
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60k families supported each year
150 years supporting young people and families
350k children accessing a healthy breakfast thanks to Family Action
