FARA

The challenge

Founded in the UK 30 years ago by Jane Nicholson MBE, FARA works to transform the lives of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged children, young people and families in Romania.

Their new WordPress website brings together the efforts of the FARA Foundation: in Romania, reaching out to beneficiaries and founders, and running the centres built to cater for their needs; the FARA charity in the UK, raising funds and awareness to provide the Foundation with the financial means to make it possible; and the 42 shops FARA has across London, which provide an invaluable tool to raise funds through the sale of pre-loved items. All three arms of the organisation now sit under one brand that truly reflects their values and uniqueness.

The brief

When we started working together, FARA was in the process of unifying its branding and core messaging across the three operational arms.

The website needed to be modern and exciting, and pay homage to Romania. It needed to highlight the dire situation and need for support of its beneficiaries, but do it by telling the story of the amazing success FARA has had over its 30 years of existence and of how much more can be accomplished in the future.

And perhaps the most important: it needed to cater for the needs of the organisation and serve as a tool for each of its arms to achieve their different goals.

The process

With a clear direction in mind, we created a WordPress multisite environment where the UK and Romania sites coexist, sharing resources and capabilities. 

The Fat Beehive and the three FARA teams worked together to achieve consensus on the Information Architecture (IA) of each site that communicates their mission, values and success, highlight their fundraising calls to action and provide useful information to benefactors and beneficiaries alike. 

A new, secondary colour was added to the original blue and red palette, introducing a vibrant yellow tone to emphasise calls to action and serve as a bridge between the charity/foundation and the shop’s branding, who’d been using black and grey as identifying colours over the years. This not only made the shop content instantly recognisable within the site but allowed us to style their new Shopify consistently.

The solution

FARA’s WordPress multisite now hosts clear and targeted content specifically written for each of their different audiences (based in the UK and Romania) – an exercise that FARA were keen to undertake after years of not being able to update their core content.

The websites now display their content in multiple languages to elevate the international profile of their work in Romania and the UK, especially to cater for the needs of government officials and international funders.

Fat Beehive continues to work with FARA to help the growth and success of the sites supporting the organisation via our ongoing strategy work.

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