The Ezekiel Project

The Brief

To ‘create a website that communicates Christianity to teenagers in a contemporary way’ for the Ezekiel Project in Northampton (we love a challenge!)

Key site objectives:

• Build awareness
• Communicate the project’s mission, events and activities
• Create sense of community amongst young Catholics in Northampton and other local stakeholders
• Convey relevance of the Christian message today
• Motivate young Catholics to volunteer for Ezekiel

Our Approach

To engage young people Baigent developed the human face of Ezekiel - ‘Zeek’. This street-styled character both personalises the site and provides a mechanism to highlight interactive areas. His presence gives the online experience ‘teenage appeal’ but is finely tuned to also serve adults, funders and volunteers.

Site visitors new to Ezekiel get a snapshot of the project via a sleek scrolling storyboard device, before navigating through to the main site. Baigent’s challenge was to make the site both innovative and practical, with interaction that required minimal administration, whilst meeting best practice on Child Protection. We recommended that this be achieved via email and SMS mailings, topical polls, and a ‘Q & A’ facility answered by the Ezekiel team).

The Results

The site has achieved great respect and interaction from teenagers and a strong reception from professionals, funders and interested adults. The site and messaging facilities are powerful yet simple to manage and although the site is small in content terms, it is key in the marketing and communication efforts of the project as a whole.