Award-winning collaboration with an inspirational charity

Full website rebuild for Bristol Children’s Hospital’s charity, The Grand Appeal

Overview

Bristol Children’s Hospital’s dedicated charity, The Grand Appeal, needed a WordPress site with improved user journeys to enable website visitors to donate, fundraise and give support easily.

The website is a critical part of the charity’s income stream, helping them support a hospital that cares for 100k+ patients each year.

What the client wanted

About The Grand Appeal, the official charity of Bristol Children’s Hospital

As the official charity of Bristol Children’s Hospital, which cares for 100k+ patients each year, The Grand Appeal has been helping save lives and support families since 1995.

Funds raised go towards providing families of critically ill children with accommodation while their child is in hospital, and financing cutting edge, innovative medical research.

It also provides the funds for state-of-the-art, life saving equipment, and works with Bristol Children’s Hospital to ensure that treatment wards are a comfortable and comforting place for patients and their families.

Challenges: Building a new online presence 

Representing the full range of The Grand Appeal’s fundraising

The Grand Appeal wanted to bridge the gaps between different aspects of their fundraising and identity.

There are so many parts to our charity. It is really multifaceted and it’s been hard to get that across to our visitors. Some people still don’t understand that Gromit Unleashed trails have anything to do with us. We needed a website that bridged all the gaps between Cots for Tots, The Grand Appeal and Gromit Unleashed.

Chloe A Smith, Marketing Officer, The Grand Appeal

Pulling together the various aspects of The Grand Appeal’s fundraising, and making some of their support services digital was also important.

The main website had to become a hub. We needed to bring all parts of The Grand Appeal into one online presence.

Chloe A Smith, Marketing Officer, The Grand Appeal

Mapping out new user journeys and improving navigation for web visitors

We brought the various aspects of the charity’s work together on the homepage, with a focus on clarity and user experience, making it easier for visitors to interact with the site and find what they’re looking for.

By doing so, we could integrate all of the different individual strands of the charity’s work and include fundraising links and initiatives.

Building an interactive Star Tribute Sky

A gratifying part of the site to work on was the new Star Tribute Sky, the digital version of the physical Star Tribute Wall in Bristol Children’s Hospital.

Star Tribute Funds give grieving families the opportunity to reflect and remember their loved ones, keep memories alive and raise money in their names.

The Star Tribute Sky is a beautiful, interactive space where families can light virtual candles, and add photos, videos and memories.

How a new website empowered The Grand Appeal’s communications team

Improving back-end usability to give freedom and control

The new Grand Appeal website was built using WordPress, giving the charity the flexibility and control they needed but had been missing.

We were on a non-WordPress website at the time and we knew we needed to move to WordPress to have better functionality and also the ability to edit and update anything we wanted.

Chloe H Smith, Communications Officer, The Grand Appeal

Building in new ways of working through close collaboration

On this project, working collaboratively took on a new meaning due to the restrictions imposed on us by the COVID-19 pandemic.

This project has actually given us new ways of working as well. It’s been a great example of how to have really focused project meetings versus just generalised catch-ups. So apart from an amazing new website, it’s given us a lot internally.

Chloe H Smith, Communications Officer, The Grand Appeal

Weekly check-ins on a Monday morning, regular follow ups, and collaborating across digital tools and platforms for planning and organisation formed various touch points that connected our organisations together.

It was comforting in a way to know that there was always a Monday call. Even if it was just checking in, it was really nice and it fostered a really good relationship between both the organisations.

Chloe H Smith, Communications Officer, The Grand Appeal

The last word