Member Article

Women’s Charity Marks Centenary of Vote With New Site

Manchester-based digital and creative agency Access has produced a new website for a major UK charity supporting women’s rights and safety.

The new Pankhurst Trust website www.pankhursttrust.org follows the merger of The Pankhurst Centre and Manchester Women’s Aid, which resulted in the creation of the Pankhurst Trust, and it’s the first time the two organisations have had a single online presence.

While the site design and functionality has been created to cater for the organisation’s diverse audience and variety of reasons that people visit the site, a primary function is to ensure that anyone suffering from domestic violence and abuse get the confidential help they need.

The Pankhurst Trust also aims to address the multifaceted relationship between the suffrage movement and ongoing gender inequality found in society. www.pankhursttrust.org provides a wealth of information regarding the suffragette movement – telling the powerful story of the women who won the vote. Anyone wanting to visit the Pankhurst Centre museum, the birthplace of the suffragette movement, can get all of the information they need from the site.

As a charity, prominence is given to ways consumers can support the Trust with easy ways to donate online, and how to raise funds, take part in events or volunteer. “2018 marks the centenary of women winning the right to vote and so launching our new site is a way of marking this”, says Lynne Warner from The Pankhurst Trust. “We’ve successfully merged our two organisations into a site that is clear, concise and informative.

“A challenging part of the site design and structure was how we achieve the right balance between providing essential services to women, men and children in need, drive donations, be informative and support our tourist attraction – The Pankhurst Centre – but Access’ in depth workshop and strategy helped us to achieve this. “We also wanted to ensure that users of the previous Manchester Women’s Aid site knew they had come to the right place and could get the right help as quickly and easily as possible.

“It is with thanks to Access, who also provided some of their services on a pro bono basis, that we have ended up with such a fantastic looking and user friendly site.” Zoe Todd from Access added: “It has been a pleasure to work with the Pankhurst Trust and to support the charity on the next phase of its exciting journey. It’s such a landmark year for the Trust, celebrating 100 years of the female vote, and it’s a charity that we were all proud to be associated with.

“The site has been built using a Drupal 8 CMS to give the team a large amount of flexibility. It is available in a wide range of languages to cater for all users accessing the site, has been integrated with MailChimp to support the charity’s email marketing and easy ways to donate have been facilitated by linking to the Trust’s Just Giving pages. “Through exceptional user experience, exciting content and mobile-responsive design, the new site will be a platform for sharing women’s stories, raising funds and offering support. It’s set to transform the charity’s digital output.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Kirsty Hunt .