EdShift is an award-winning community interest company. Their mission is to protect the emotional health and wellbeing of young people and equip them with the skills and awareness to aspire to and achieve healthy, equal and fulfilling relationships. The charity runs counselling and performing arts based workshops to empower children and young people exposed to and affected by domestic abuse and sexual violence in all its forms.
EdShift equip children living with domestic abuse and violence with coping strategies and vital safety planning skills so they can deal with the demands of their home environment and reduce risk should a further incident take place. They provide specialised Arts Psychotherapy, giving children and young people dealing with complex trauma a greater chance to overcome their adverse experiences so they can journey towards healing and recovery. They Strive to prevent domestic abuse and sexual violence by engaging with young people, schools and the wider community to raise awareness and break the cycle of violence.
EdShift provide practical support and training to address the challenges and issues faced by our community, working with professionals and statutory agencies to share practice and ensure that the voices of the children and young people they support are the driving force for social change.
EdShift’s website was initially created on a shoe-string budget when they were a small start-up with two staff members and no physical premises. The initial site was a very basic information-website with blog functionality. It served a purpose at the time to direct people and funders to their online platform. Over the last five years EdShift has grown substantially and now have several members of staff and a board of directors. They have a beautiful three story building in the heart of Halifax and have considerably expanded their services. They now provide their services at a much larger scale. They had outgrown their old website and felt it just didn’t reflect who they were anymore. It also didn’t showcase any of the amazing work they had been doing in recent years. They felt strongly that it was time for a complete revamp and to start from the bottom up.
EdShift wanted their new website to showcase their incredible projects, resources and services. They wanted their evolved brand identity to be incorporated and reflected throughout the site, and for the website to have a more sophisticated user experience. To enable EdShift to increase their donations and memberships, they wanted e-commerce functionality to allow them to sell artwork and merchandise. They also required a members portal for their users to be able to log-in, allowing them access to children’s resources, courses, games and activities. They wanted the membership portal to be separated into two age groups with age restricted content.
The website needed to be multi-layered and optimised to service a number of key groups – funders, school bodies, councils, users (children) and young people looking for advice and guidance.
We’ve been working closely with EdShift since their inception. We created their brand identity and their initial website to get them started. Working with EdShift for many years has given us insight into their operations and the advantage of having a deep understanding of their brand and a very clear understanding of their needs. We have been fortunate to witness their growth and success and have been part of a number of their projects. The close relationship gave us the benefit of being able to ascertain what was needed to create their ideal website.
We began by planning out the content, the wireframe, page layouts and the different levels of functionality. We also thought about how these levels could all operate together most effectively. The members section for their main users, i.e children between ages 4-18, would act as a completely separate section, only accessible by login details. We planned out the members section and the ecommerce sections. We collated all information and content from EdShift. This included team biographies, photographs, content about their projects, services and their mission. We also developed a wireframe-design for each section of the website. This enabled us to plan the page layout, the overall design-style, template styles, the navigational map, dynamic content and multi-layered site functions.
After a consultation with the EdShift founder and her team, they approved the wireframes and set about gathering all of the necessary content we needed to begin building and developing the website. We added our unique artwork by creating graphics, diagrams, infographics and illustrations, to enhance the look and feel of the website. We designed the website to be responsive on all devices and screen sizes and created user permissions to separate content from members and non-members. We also added a safety-exit button so that young people can easily leave the website in a hurry if they need to.
The new EdShift site is now a multifunctional website that serves multiple functions for users, funders, members and regular visitors. The website now reflects EdShift’s brand identity more appropriately. It is now a great foundation for EdShift to build on and continue to add content to as they continue to develop and advance. Their e-commerce store allows them to raise more donations and to showcase the artwork the children have created on their programmes.
Their website is now more dynamic and responsive, allowing for children to log in and access important information, resources and activities. The team also feel that the site is much easier to edit and manage themselves now that the structure is simplified and more intuitive.
“We approached Grinning Graphics at the very start of EdShift. We had a limited budget and a large vision. Grinning Graphics were so passionate about our goals and mission and really connected with our vision for EdShift. They produced an outstanding brand identity and website for us to get us started. Grinning Graphics have since developed the website into a membership website to allow children on our SpotLight programme to log in to a members area and access resources, upload their own posts and log their feelings. Grinning Graphics restructured our website to include additional functionality such as e-commerce and a resources area. We won’t go anywhere else, Grinning Graphics just get it, we view them as valued members of the EdShift family and we know they will continue to support us with our future growth.”
Ellie Brook - CEO and Founder EdShift CIC
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