Enable Interactive raises awareness with War Child

War Child, a charity that works with children from war-torn countries such as Iraq, teamed up with Enable Interactive to create a website to communicate digitally with 16-24-year-olds.

Enable Interactive's brief was to redesign the War Child site so that it raised awareness among its target group in a clear and compelling way, increasing the number of one-off and regular donors as well as opening up other merchandising opportunities.

Ultimately War Child wanted to establish an online brand.

Not only did the existing site fail to appeal to the youth market but War Child was also experiencing problems with their CMS.

Added to which they wanted to increase their fundraising and merchandising opportunities.

"As an organisation we are young, dynamic and friendly", said Will Lord, Online Communications Manager, War Child.

"We wanted to reflect this in our website and engage a younger audience without alienating others".

The project was a great fit for Enable not only because of the strength of the agency's strategic, creative and technical work, but its strong track record in working with charities, passion for effecting positive social change across digital media and importantly its knowledge of the youth market made Enable Interactive the agency of choice for War Child.

"We built up a great rapport with the team and felt like their friendly, personal approach was a perfect match for War Child," said Lord.

"Enable showed real understanding for our work and was able to demonstrate how this would translate into an exciting and innovative site by using digital in a way that related to our audience".

Enable's strategy made use of War Child's existing and excellent content making sure that it could be used throughout the online communities used by younger audiences.

They integrated blogging, linking and social bookmarking, and embedded popular new media sites such as Flickr and YouTube so that War Child would benefit not only from increased site traffic through the social mobility of content, but also enhanced search engine performance.

The end result is deeper than a simple website facelift; thesite brims with community features that open up more possibilities and social networking opportunities for the charity.

The updates on blogs and twitter are producing inspiring content and its fluidity allows War Child's campaign messages to be spread by its audiences.

"We only ever build solutions that are designed to last, and to scale, and we know how to present work in a way that builds relationships and encourages visitors to move from engagement to take action," claimed Matt Connolly, Strategy Director for Enable.

They redesigned the site to make it simpler to find out about War Child's campaigns and activities and ensured that use of the War Child brand was consistent across all campaign activity.

To avoid the risks associated with using photos of children in war zones and offer a simple visual overview of each conflict Enable's team created illustrations to represent each of the countries that the charity works in.

Enable introduced War Child to Drupal, an open-source software tool which makes content management simple and functional, even for users with very little technical knowledge.

By implementing a site-wide CMS the digital team at War Child can now control site content and can create new content areas when needed.

"Working with Enable has been a pleasure from proposal to launch; their personal approach made them easy to work with and their talented creative and technical teams built a site which far exceeded our original expectations," added Lord.

"As a small organisation with limited resources it was vital that we worked with an agency that understood the challenges we faced and approached them innovatively and creatively: Enable did just that".

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