Digital strategy, design and web development for

The Freedom Fund is a global organisation with the sole aim of ending modern slavery. They work in in the countries and sectors where the exploitation of people is prevalent.

The challenge

The organisation tackles a wide-range of issues from child labour to forced marriage. By partnering with survivors, investors and international governments, they seek to dismantle the systems that allow slavery to thrive.

The Freedom Fund tasked us with creating a new website that was responsive and engaging for visitors. It needed to align to their newly updated strategic objectives. The navigation needed be intuitive so that users could follow a logical pathway through the site by learning about modern slavery, understanding about the fund’s impact, and then taking action themselves.

The work

The project commenced with a discovery phase with internal stakeholders to identify the needs, opportunities and issues that would inform the design and development of the site.

Building from these findings, we iteratively planned the site structure and UX using wireframes, sitemaps and journey maps. As we progressed the design, we gradually layered in further design detail, taking Freedom Funds new brand guidelines into account. Our designs covered the finer points of interactivity, ensuring that transitions and animations in the UI felt delightful and on-brand.

Expanding the organisation’s reach and raising brand awareness was a crucial element of the project. To that end, we ensured that landing pages were carefully considered from an SEO perspective. Keyword research was conducted ensure the most user-compatible terms had been used in the website copy. With inclusivity at the heart of Freedom Fund’s values, it was also important to ensure the site was level-AA accessibility compliant with the WCAG guidelines.

Once fully approved in design, we moved into development. Freedom Fund were keen to use WordPress as a CMS due to team familiarity. We developed a intuitive admin view using Advanced Custom Fields. This allowed pages to be easily and flexibly edited with a ‘drag-and-drop’ interface. During deployment we collaborated closely with the Freedom Fund stakeholders to ensure that all refreshed content worked beautifully in the updated designs, and that the hundreds of research library and partner resources were migrated seamlessly to the new CMS.