Changing Lives

Building trust

For someone looking for support, life may already feel complicated enough. A charity website should never add to that complexity.

Yet the same website also has to do several other jobs. It needs to reassure commissioners, inspire confidence in corporate partners, encourage donations and demonstrate the impact of the charity’s work. Balancing those different needs is no small task.

That was the challenge facing Changing Lives.

For more than 55 years, this national charity has supported people experiencing the challenges of homelessness. Today, it helps more than 14,000 people every year. Its existing website was becoming harder to manage, less effective on mobile devices and increasingly out of step with the organisation it represented.

The new website needed to make support easier to find, easier to trust and easier to fund.

Turning information into action

Changing Lives already had a wealth of valuable information. The challenge was helping each visitor reach the right part of it.

Someone looking for local support shouldn’t need to understand how the charity is organised before they can find the right service. Equally, a commissioner, corporate partner or supporter arrives with completely different priorities.

Rather than concentrating on individual pages, we focused on what people were trying to achieve. The website was reshaped around two clear ideas – finding support and giving support – creating clearer routes through the site for every audience.

Finding the right service was particularly important. Changing Lives works across a large geographical area and offers many different types of support, so we developed a support finder and an interactive map that let people explore what’s available and find the help that’s relevant to them. Instead of expecting visitors to understand the organisation first, the website does more of that work for them.

The site also needed to communicate how those different services fit together. Changing Lives’ ecosystem model helps show the connections between its areas of work and gives visitors a clearer sense of the organisation as a whole.

Accessibility runs throughout the experience, with clearer navigation, local menus, breadcrumbs and Recite Me helping more people access information in the way that suits them best.

Removing obstacles for supporters

Making support easier to find was only half of the challenge. The website also needed to encourage more people to donate, fundraise and partner with the charity.

One of the most important improvements was the fundraising journey. Someone signing up for an activity on the Changing Lives website can now have their JustGiving fundraising page created automatically as part of the same process. There’s no need to leave the journey, register somewhere else and set up another page before they can start fundraising.

It makes getting involved much simpler for supporters and removes another manual process for the Changing Lives team. Crucially, it allows someone to set up their fundraising page while they’re already motivated to get involved, rather than asking them to leave the website and come back to it later. That removes another point where potential fundraisers might otherwise drop out of the process. The charity can capture the information it needs while the fundraiser gets everything they need to start raising money straight away.

Other journeys have been simplified too. Whether someone is making a donation, registering their interest or exploring other ways to support Changing Lives, there are clearer routes from interest to action.

“Our website is often one of the first points of contact people have with Changing Lives, so it is vital that it is clear, accessible and easy to navigate. The new site makes it much easier for people to find the support they need, while also giving supporters, partners and commissioners a clearer understanding of who we are and the impact of our work. Fat Beehive have worked closely with us to create a website that reflects Changing Lives today and gives us a strong platform to build on for the future.”

– Stephen Bell OBE, Chief Executive, Changing Lives

The result is a website that works harder for everyone. Visitors can complete important actions more easily, while the charity spends less time managing processes behind the scenes and more time supporting the people who rely on its services.

Learning what works

Our relationship with Changing Lives didn’t stop when the website launched. We still meet regularly to look at what’s working, what could work better and where the next opportunities lie as part of their retainer.

Because a successful charity website isn’t measured by how it looks. It’s measured by what it helps people do.

For Changing Lives, that means helping more people find support when they need it while making it easier for others to sustain that work.

Want your website to do more for the people you support? Let’s talk about how we can help.

changing-lives.org.uk