Using stories to connect audiences with a charity's services

Meningitis Now's previous site was somewhat overwhelming, particularly the navigation. It didn’t serve the standard use cases as well as it might. And, it didn’t work well on mobile. The bounce rate and single session levels were very high because the most common use case is people checking signs and symptoms of meningitis in a potential emergency.

In consultation with internal staff and users (including being invited to the House of Commons to meet some of their key supporters over tea and french fancies), we employed our user modelling process to quickly identify personas, needs, and user journeys.

Our process is about delivering on user needs and organisational objectives, so we identified the actions that we wanted people to complete, creating a Wagtail snippet for each. Editors are now able to add the most context relevant call to action at the end of any page.

And stories of people are placed at the heart of the experience, we use these as an additional way to expose the fantastic services that the charity offers to support people who have had or are experiencing meningitis.

We set out to to deliver a strong brand experience but without allowing the brand to overwhelm the content. And the site achieves this. The design is particularly strong on mobile as befits a site where 75% of the visits are now on mobile!

The site immediately looks uncluttered and straightforward, which is what you need, especially if you are faced with the terrifying prospect of needing to confirm the symptoms of meningitis. The navigation has been hugely reduced and simplified, as has the number of items visible at any one time.

In parallel to the website redevelopment, Meningitis Now were also introducing a new Salesforce CRM with which the site integrates. Though not our first time integrating Salesforce, this was the first time we have integrated it with Wagtail. We specified, built and delivered a Wagtail integration that captures, backs up and posts to Salesforce all submissions made through Wagtail.

Using Wagtail's Formbuilder we delivered a flexible form creation system that allows Meningitis Now to create any kind of form and capture any kind of data request (e.g. contact information, support request, multiple choice questions, etc.) into Salesforce. It offers a robust and scalable approach to Salesforce CRM integration.

While the single visit rate and bounce rate are still high as you would expect, the site now has:

• 50% more repeat visitors than this time last year.
  
• Mobile usage up to almost 75% against a national average of 30%, and this is driving significant growth in traffic.
  
• Organic search referrals up 58% and in the last two months page views are up almost 40% on last year.
  

And people are completing more actions on the site too. We are proud of a focused and effective site and have enjoyed every moment of working with Meningitis Now.

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