20 amazing charities from Glasgow to Kabul, The Prince’s Charities are a community of organisations and people that cover an incredible range of interests – from helping young people in the UK, to helping Afghans maintain their traditional crafts.
The Life of the Charities
Over 10 months we worked closely with Clarence House and the charities to develop a website that educates visitors about the work of The Prince’s 20 charities and social enterprises while also providing them with an opportunity to get involved.
The site focuses on the people and organisations that make up the community behind the charities. It features profiles of charity employees, supporters and beneficiaries, as well as inspirational stories, blogs, news, films and events. Visitors can show their support by signing up on the site to join this community.
We hired FoxLand because they brought a fresh approach to the project, and came equipped with enthusiasm, dynamism, new thinking, energy and a willingness to listen. Working with the company was a dream – really nice people, always a pleasure to discuss business with, professional yet not stuffy, and receptive to our demands. Timescales were unfailingly met, the cost was reasonable, the quality of product faultless. Recommended!
Nick Smedley, Research Director
The Prince’s Charities
Discovery
While many people feel they know what The Prince’s Charities are involved with, we realised they rarely know the full and rich picture. The site was designed to let people ‘discover’ the people, work and events that the organisations are involved with. Rather than explaining what they do by simply using copy, we hope users are able to explore the activities by exposing them up-front. Whether via the people that work for charities, or what is going on where the user lives, via blog posts, stories or the charities themselves.
We are The Prince’s Charities
The website’s homepage reflects the talents of the people involved who make-up The Prince’s Charities – from the public, the people who help keep the charities working, the staff at Clarence House, all the way through to His Royal Highness himself. We created a constantly changing and updating ‘wall’ of profiles that you can interact with and lead you deeper into the site.
Technology
Technically a highly complex project, we developed the site from the ground up – from information architecture, all the way through to a full PHP/MySQL backend using the Drupal Content Management System. The site was crafted to be fully accessible, be search engine friendly and conform to the highest of coding standards.
Now
We continue our relationship with Clarence House, working on updates and changes to the site all the time. Lots of exciting ideas and changes are always being developed, and we can’t wait to see where the site will go.
Join Us
The original spark for the website was to draw people into a community of the like-minded. From around the world people in their thousands have already joined up. You can too!
You can see some of the people who have joined up on the homepage’s wall of people, and in the People section. Signing up you can show your support for the work of The Prince’s Charities, get the monthly newsletter, win prizes and see special content on the website.
The power of this community, coming together with these shared interests has huge potential for the future direction of the website and the way the charities can connect with people.
A Good Neighbour
For an organisation that encompasses so many charities, it was vital that the project didn’t create ‘extra’ work or have any unnecessary overlap. With that in mind, the website was designed to aggregate and promote new content, and push people through to the charity’s own website.
For example, the blog and event content can be automatically populated entirely from content from the charities websites. These then link back through to the articles where they come from.
Exploring content the way you want to
All the content in the site can be viewed in a variety of ways. Not only can you read the profiles, blog entries and events, but you can even explore the content on a map.
Processes
Project link: The Prince’s Charities
These are just some of the tasks we undertook for this project…