A non-tech digital strategy for an age-in-place charity

McAuley Place are an innovative age in place charity that provides independent accommodation for older people, in the heart of the town, and connected to a vibrant arts and community centre. Supporting an active and engaging, multi-generational community with a tapestry of businesses and initiatives.

Their website is a busy digital platform that needed to be a hard working, very effective and accessible digital hub, connecting everything they do for their whole community. As they’re a small charity organisation, run mainly by volunteers they needed a strategy and site that was highly sustainable for them as an organisation.

We ran a bootcamp to clarify the needs, intent, and how they worked. Mapping operations to understand the dynamics and responsibilities of the team, mapping interactions to understand the different audiences and their needs. This work revealed significant challenges in the management of the site with so many volunteers working across different areas and no central owner, causing issues with updates, responses, knowledge sharing and onboarding.

Each volunteer team already had a set of workflows for the management of social activity and channels. We worked with them to explore new approaches that utilised these existing digital workflows, designing digital architecture that streamlined interactions and admin across the site and social channels.

A new website front end was designed to simplify journeys for a wide range of users with different needs, helping them reach the right volunteer group quickly and undertake interactions on social channels which are managed constantly. We developed playbooks that were easy to understand and use and that supported the volunteers tasked with delivering the work.

This made the onboarding process of the new site pain free, and made it easy to train and onboard new volunteers, hugely streamlining the site build and management to greatly increase effectiveness and communication response times, while delivering efficiencies on time and costs.