RedR's new website shortlisted for Charity Times Award

You may have noticed that RedR’s website has undergone a radical transformation! For the past year, we’ve been working with award-winning Oxfordshire-based digital design agency Syndicut to develop a responsive, user-friendly website that meets the needs of our different audiences, showcases our work and that of those we train, and does justice to RedR’s expertise. Nick Bromage, founder and Director of Syndicut, explains how we went about it.

As a digital agency we rarely have the opportunity to create something that can really make a difference in today's society. So we were very excited to be able to help influence and reshape RedR’s digital offering: not only making life easier for RedR staff, but also improving user experience in order to better showcase the great work RedR does.

We love working with charities, and the brief appealed to us in the breadth of difference we could make for RedR and its supporters.

Left: Nick Bromage, Director of Syndicut

We have had the opportunity to work alongside some great charities in the past, including Rory Peck Trust, Greenpeace, Wood Green, Witness, International Labour Organisation, Living Streets. We have been working with Rory Peck Trust for over five years and have not only helped them to develop a new website, but also helped with producing brochures for their annual awards ceremony, which celebrates the work of Freelance Journalists.

We encountered various challenges, but this is part and parcel of creating a large website like this. We started by looking at the website’s core audiences: how they interact with the content, and how we could help RedR give them a better experience. We also wanted to reduce workload at RedR by updating, digitising and automating certain processes that were taking a lot of staff time. In order to do this we needed to understand and document RedR’s existing processes, allowing us to create functionalities that would make the experience as smooth as possible for both front- and back-end users.

Aside from what we feel is a beautifully designed website, we love the way the site is integrated with both Eventbrite and Salesforce, allowing RedR to use all the features offered by Eventbrite’s event-booking system, track user activity through Salesforce, and start building a fuller picture of their audiences.

RedR’s website has been shortlisted for a 2017 Charity Times Award, in the ‘Best Use of the Web’ category. The result will be announced at an awards dinner on 4th October.