Barnardos

Barnardos Change a child’s future campaign

Barnardos biggest ever fundraising campaign seeks to address current funding pressures that are putting their vital services in danger. The "Change a Child's Future" campaign highlights the essential work done by Barnardos, showing a number of shocking true life stories of children who Barnardos are currently helping. Barnardos again worked with Combined Media to develop this unique campaign site.

Listening to Barnardos

Barnardos is probably the best established and most highly respected name in the field of child-welfare in Ireland. As far as the web goes, they already have a very extensive web site that supplies a vast amount of research information, details of their services, details on the various and many fundraisers they run, and the collection of online donations.

The challenge for this project was to build a strong uniquely branded web presence that would have a distinct separate identity and support an extensive TV, press, outdoor and radio campaign. The site needed to mirror the above-the-line material in look and feel, and use rich media to expand on the case stories featured in the advertising material. The most important part of the site was of course directing people to the donations section and collecting donations. No matter where people heard the campaign message, their point of contact with Barnardos was going to be this web site.

Barnardos has a whole host of celebrity supporters who promote and blog about their involvement with the organisation and encourage others to do the same. The whole area of linkages with social networking sites was obviously going to be an important factor.

Sketch Ideas & Plan

It was decided that a stand alone site separate from the main Barnardos structure would be the best way to make this campaign stand out. A unique identity would be developed to complement the above-the-line material. The site would focus on four individual cases to demonstrate the kind of work that Barnardos is involved in day today. Rich media would be used to support the telling of these stories. The main focus would be directing users to the donations page to commit to a regular monthly contribution or make a one-off donation.

Design & build

The site was built on Barnardos existing content management system and technology. Our flexible development team has experience with many technologies and in most cases can accommodate clients who wish to keep their existing set-ups.

We developed an interactive story panel, that allowed users get a summary of each of the case stories including listening to audio from the case workers. Users could then link to pages with full details of each case.

The celebrity supporters were strongly featured on the front page of the site, along with messages of support on subsequent pages.The strong black and white branding supported the TV, press and outdoor campaign, and online

Flash stings were created to complement this material. A media section was created where users could download web banners and materials for use on their own sites.

User testing was carried out on how best to direct people to the donations section and this section was developed based on that feedback.

Links were created to social networking sites of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter to reach a broad audience across the web, and Barnardos content from these sites was linked back to the campaign site. The Barnardos pages of these sites were customised to reflect the latest campaign message.

Deploy manage & grow

The site was hosted as a sub URL of the main Baranrdos site, but for the beginning of the campaign all visitors to barnardos.ie where directed to the campaign site.
The donations are the main test of the site’s success and as the campaign continues the site’s stats are being closely monitored. Split testing is active on the site, and tweaks are being made based on user activity. Barnardos have set a very ambitious target for donations, are we’re confident that that will be achieved based on initial results.