Redesigning digital journeys to help protect sight

Sightsavers is an international charity working around the world to prevent avoidable blindness, support equality for people with disabilities and advocate for change.

The charity works in more than 30 countries around the world, with fundraising and operations based in the UK, US, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Italy, the Middle East and India. They needed to refresh their website to enhance their fundraising and advocacy work worldwide, paying particular attention to the donor journey to maximise conversion rates.

Prior to the project, the charity used separate websites for audiences in the UK, US and Ireland, making the process of updating content and functionality complicated and lengthy. They were seeking a solution that would remove these hurdles for content editors, speed up the process of making website changes, and provide more flexibility when it came to creating new content.

We embarked upon a design and UX phase in March 2017, working closely with the Sightsavers team to define their audiences and create new user journeys.

Improving efficiency with WordPress multisite

It was decided that, rather than maintaining a setup which used several WordPress installations, to combine them all under a single multisite install. This would give the team at Sightsavers the ability to push code changes to all the regional websites simultaneously, dramatically improving the efficiency of delivering website changes. The WordPress multisite install would also allow for managing the permissions of editors and admins on a region-by-region basis and make it easier to optimise regionalised content for search and social media.

Making content creation more flexible

We created the Sightsavers ecosystem of websites with a bespoke page-builder which allows editors to build new pages using a series of pre-built modules. This empowers content creators to mix text, images and video as freely as they like within a page, unlocking their ability to develop immersive, engaging content which inspires their audiences to take action.

The ‘Donate’ module was developed to be similarly flexible, giving the Sightsavers team the ability to embed context-specific calls to action in a wide variety of locations and formats.

Regionalising content to cut workloads

Previously Sightsavers maintained separate websites for their audiences in the UK, US and Ireland, whereas the new, unified English-language site allows editors to regionalise content by populating pages with different content blocks according to the location of the user. This has significantly reduced the website admin requirements for the UK, US and Ireland offices as well as providing a more consistent brand experience.

Building on success

The new Sightsavers website launched in October with a single, global site for English-speaking audiences. The flexibility of the multisite installation has allowed the organisation to add a further four regional websites to their portfolio in the months since, with minimal developer support.

“Sightsavers worked collaboratively with Manifesto to develop a new web presence that was aligned to our visual identity and tone.

“The multisite content management system that has been developed around our needs not only allows us to operate a cleaner editorial process, with greatly reduced duplication across our English-language content, it is also much nicer for our content team to use.

“The modular design allows us to develop a coherent approach to user experience, whilst still enabling us to experiment.” – Neil Ayres, Global Head of Online at Sightsavers

 

How this helps us on your project

We have considerable experience with helping global brands improve their editorial workflows and user experiences across multiple regions, selecting and customising the right technology to support their strategic goals.