The Children's Society
Driving audience engagement and donations through a bold, optimistic design and thoughtfully planned user journeys
The Children's Society aims to reverse negative trends in youth well-being. By working one-to-one with the most vulnerable children and amplifying their voices, they strive to inspire a movement that seeks societal change, fostering hope for the future of all children. We were enormously proud to work with The Children’s Society as their digital agency. Like a great deal of our work, this project really matters, and we took our role very seriously.
Challenge
The society needed a new website that was more user-friendly to improve audience engagement and, crucially, donation rates. The overall page count needed to be significantly reduced (from 15,000 to 4,000) making the site more focused and easier to navigate. The website also required an aesthetic overhaul and to be optimised for mobile.
Approach
We introduced a bold and optimistic design for the new website leveraging large-scale, impactful imagery and a custom typeface to centre the voices of young people. We incorporated movement into our designs, maintaining a sense of vertical rhythm on every page and ensuring this tactile sense of movement was compatible with all devices.
To streamline the content pages, we established a new content model that aligned key information with critical user journeys. We also implemented a conversion rate optimisation strategy targeting key audience segments, aiming to increase engagement across three main pillars: education, inspiration, and investment.
Following extensive user testing and refinement, we launched the new website. It aimed to educate users about the issues facing young people, inspire change through authentic stories, and encourage investment, either through donations, volunteering, or support for online campaigns.
Results
The redesigned website was received positively by users with 80% of repeat visitors asserting its improvement over the previous site. Key performance metrics were tremendously improved too:
- The number of users making a donation increased by 636%, demonstrating the efficacy of the user journeys we developed, and the donation completion rate increased by an astounding 1322%, demonstrating how simple and intuitive it is to use the donation system we implemented. Such a substantial increase in online donations made a huge difference to the charity, supporting their important work.
- The bounce rate decreased by 28% demonstrating that users were finding content of relevance to them, and therefore staying on the website.
"Our new website is designed to inspire a new generation of people who want to join us in building a society for all children. It amplifies young people’s voices and their stories of hope. Our design is simple and easy to use so everyone can play their part in restoring young people’s hope when it’s threatened by neglect, abuse or exploitation.”