Donations, a 100 Club raffle and self-referral, joined up for a mental health charity

The problem, in business terms

Somewhere House Somerset is a mental health charity, and its website has three jobs to do at once: explain the work, bring money in, and give someone who needs help a way to ask for it. The old site did the first of those and not the other two.

There was also a practical constraint that matters more for a charity than for most clients. Nobody there was going to pay a developer every time a page needed changing, so whatever we built had to be theirs to edit.

What we did

• Rebuilt and modernised the site in WordPress, so the team can update it themselves without coming back to us.
• Added the 100 Club raffle to the site, so it runs online rather than on paper.
• Enabled online donations, which the previous site could not take at all.
• Integrated Greenshoots, the self-referral software the charity uses, so someone can refer themselves from the website instead of having to make a phone call.

Hosted on our own servers with 24/7 monitoring.

Worth being straight about which part is which: Greenshoots is specialist third-party software built for exactly this purpose, and it would have been the wrong call to build a worse version of it from scratch on a charity's budget. Our job was to choose it, wire it in properly, and make the route into it obvious from the website. Integration work is often the honest answer.

The result

The charity has one site that explains the work, takes donations, runs the 100 Club and hands someone straight to the referral process, and the team keep it up to date themselves. It is all live at somewherehousesomerset.org, including the three routes we added, so you can see the shape of it rather than take our word for it.