ABOUT

Design, planning, strategy, visual and brand language, UX and build of extensive WordPress website and digital platform overhaul for large charity; plus cost of living fundraising campaign.

Brief:

Jewish Care is the leading provider of care and community services for the Jewish community in London and the South-East. Every week the organisation touches over 10,000 lives through its care homes, retirement living schemes, community centres, assisted living schemes, dementia centres, meals on wheels service, care bus and telephone helpline. The charity has thousands of professional staff (from care provision to marketing and fundraising), volunteers, donors and fundraisers.

Jewish Care came to Creative Clinic to provide an overhaul of their digital identity and provision, and also to support with a cost of living crisis awareness and fundraising campaign. Given the scale of the organisation and the charity’s multiple audiences and stakeholders, many who have accessibility needs and would be considered vulnerable, it was critical to create an approach that was sympathetic, easy to use and accessible.

Although Jewish Care already had a well-visited website, it was widely felt that the site was difficult to navigate, clunky to maintain and out-dated in its design and functionality. Most importantly, the website was not accessible, particularly to its target audience of older people and their families. Furthermore, the present digital offering was not user-friendly and did not offer or maximise the benefits that might be expected from a leading social welfare charity: such as ease of finding critical information, chat functionality, streaming content, plus seamless donation and event bookings functionality.

The first part of the brief was to create the website as a virtual ‘fifth hub’ (the organisation already had four physical hubs e.g. clusters of care homes, community day centres, assisted living, dementia centres) and to address all of the existing technical and user limitations and frustrations, resulting in a flagship website that reflected the status of the charity, provided exceptional value to users, and which enabled future digital growth.

The second part of the brief, post website deployment, was to create a marketing and awareness campaign to inform the target audience about the new website and all its enhanced new features. This was to include press advertising, e-marketing and social media applications. This was then to be followed up with a fundraising campaign centred around the impact of the cost of living crisis, using the website as the destination for driving charitable donations.

Concept:

Our over-arching concept was to deliver the Jewish Care ‘physical’ experience that the target audience knows and trusts, but digitally and ‘on-tap’. The ‘on-tap’ idea relates to having a vast bank of information and resources available at any time, anywhere, whilst also alluding to the simplicity of use (being able to tap on a touch-screen and find what is needed quickly).

Execution:

We approached the new website from a ground zero perspective, beginning by running multiple workshops with various departments and stakeholders (e.g. care and welfare provision, fundraising, marketing, events and users etc.) to understand what wasn’t working for them with the current website and what they would love their digital presence and ‘fifth hub’ to look and function like. We called this ‘purple sky thinking’ on account of Jewish Care’s heavy use of purple in their brand palette.

We restructured the navigation and content, and added enhanced search functionality, to make it more intuitive for users to find what they might be looking for. We changed the shade of purple used for digital throughout, to achieve greater standout and contrast for accessibility. We introduced a new accessible web font and turquoise colour to the website design and their brand book, to aid user experience with high contrast action button and accent / emphasis areas. We used large, clear font sizes and wide clickable areas across the website and introduced other accessible features such as text re-scaling and a text-to-speech reader.

We introduced other new, and in some cases ground-breaking for the sector, functionality including a ‘cost-of-care’ calculator that provides immediate transparency around care home fees (which are generally less direct and easy to find on other providers’ websites) plus a free streaming / catch-up video service so that users can enjoy talks, performances and exercises from their own homes on-demand, rather than only by physically attending sessions in person (beneficial for older people who may not easily be able to travel).

The new website also includes an enhanced donation and events booking section, a chat-bot, animated video explainer guides, helpful resources, and areas for volunteers and fundraising.

The site launch was supported by campaign press advertising and social content, highlighting specific features of value to the target audience.

This was followed by a targeted fundraising and awareness campaign around the cost of living crisis, which utilised direct mail, press advertising, e-marketing, social media and film. This campaign, centring around the idea that as an organisation Jewish Care can’t just ‘turn things off’ to save money as we might individually do at home to save on energy costs, drove traffic to the new website where users could find out more and make online donations.

Results:

Since launching in November 2022, there has been a steady increase in the number of people using the website and utilising new features, plus engagement and response has been hugely positive from various audiences and stakeholders.

Ellisa Estrin, Director of Marketing, Communications & Customer Engagement at Jewish Care wrote to us with the following: “I just wanted to say the response we have had from both our staff and trustees in response to our new website has been truly phenomenal!! People are absolutely raving about it, thank you so much for all the hard work, thinking and high delivery that has gone into this. Thanks again to all of you, you guys are the ‘dream team’!”

The cost of living campaign was also highly successful and exceeded fundraising targets.