Website design for charities and not-for-profit

Safe and Sound Homes (SASH)

SASH is a York-based charity working to help prevent youth homelessness throughout the North and East of Yorkshire. They have a network of volunteers who can provide a room for a young person aged 16-25. Their host network is specially trained to offer support, and help the young people move forward.

Key aims

Castlegate was asked to design and build a website that would raise the profile of SASH and provide a platform for them to share information about the great work they do.

The key aim of the project was to increase user interaction. Donations are key to the success of any charity, so it was paramount the website maximises these opportunities.

Core users

Through close liaison with the team at SASH we identified a broad base of site users including:

Active SASH hosts seeking information

Those interested in becoming SASH hosts

Individual supporters, funding agencies, and sponsoring organisations

Service commissioners, partner agencies and regulators

SASH staff and trustees

Potential employees

Professionals seeking to refer young people

Young people seeking to use SASH services

Wants, needs, and goals

We then created an in-depth questionnaire to find out how the goals of the key demographics within our broad base aligned with the goals of SASH as an organisation, and what things we could do to help develop this engagement further. This revealed:

who uses the website
what they use the site for
where they use the site
how they use the site
why they use the site

From this research we developed four distinct personas of users to help direct our design decisions.

Research based design

As much as each persona was different and needed to be catered for specifically, one key trait linking the persona groups was their enjoyment of the stories coming out of SASH.

This formed the basis of our creative work. Host and Service User stories became central to the website. Clear on page calls to action were designed to elicit an emotional response and direct site visitors on a journey with prompts for further user exploration and engagement.

The result

The site is built on the WordPress CMS meaning it is user-friendly and easy to update for the SASH team. The design and build are totally bespoke, which allowed Castlegate the freedom to craft something unique for a really great local organisation.

Since site launch SASH has seen an increase in donations, enquires about becoming a host and an increase in general user engagement.