British Red Cross

The brief

To develop a new highly accessible site design incorporating the British Red Cross’ updated branding. The structure must make the site simpler to use, information easier to find, promote donations – and assist the writing team in creating and presenting engaging content.

Our approach

Four years working with the Red Cross gave Baigent a deep understanding of the demands of the site structure, whilst our creativity ensured confident interpretation of the new branding. The design brings the Red Cross to life through gritty images taken in the field.

Red Cross have a local, national and international presence and this required consideration when structuring the site; Baigent analysed the different audiences and their requirements and developed the structure accordingly. Thus, popular content – e.g. Finding First Aid training – is swiftly found via the Quick Links facility, whilst local information is easily accessed by an “In your area” tool. Baigent were among the first to develop this facility for a charity and it’s proved one of the most popular parts of the site – used by a quarter of all visitors.

Another key area is the multilingual tracing service. This section provides content-managed information on the Red Cross' tracing and messaging service in 11 languages, including non western fonts such as Arabic.

Fundraising is key and the Donations section supports credit card and regular giving via direct debits using Baigent’s new Fundraising Element. Importantly, fundraising is integrated throughout - staff can promote an appeal and enable users to start a donation from any site page. 

The site was launched simultaneously with the Tsunami appeal and being able to customise the homepage to a specific appeal proved invaluable.

Since launch we've developed an e-commerce facility, enabling visitors to choose from over 1,500 products online. The Red Cross online shop is designed to maximise sales opportunities, and has strong visual appeal reflecting the charity’s branding.  The site is user friendly and easy to navigate, for example showing the most popular products first based on real-time basket data. The online shop is fully integrated with their fulfillment agency, Braywood, and carries the latest stock levels to ensure it gives the best experience to shoppers.

The results

Shortlisted for Communicators in Business awards 2006: Best Website and Best Charity Website.

The site works successfully on a large scale running with over 5,500 pages and over 20 Site Manager users at the Red Cross.

Incredibly popular, the site has over 300,000 visits each month and usage continues to grow.