After working with the Good Faith Partnership on a previous project, I was asked to give my proposal on how I would make a website for new project. The project was in response to the energy crisis in the UK, to partner with public spaces across the nation to become warm and safe places for those who weren't able to afford to heat their homes.
I loved the vision and quick-thinking to combat what was distressing and potentially fatal news to millions of people. Good Faith accepted my proposal and we got to work. The website needed an interactive map so that anyone from the public could locate their nearest Warm Welcome Space. Therefore, the site needed signup and login functionality for organisations to login and change their information that would then update the map, as the team wouldn't have capacity to change the information manually.
The first build in 2022 enabled 6,000 organisations to register (4,000+ open on the map), providing a warm space for their local communities to access in a fight against the energy crisis that has gripped our nation. It reached over 50k visitors per week with users finding a warm space or organisations using resources to equip themselves in the safe delivery of their own warm welcome space.
Because of the success in the first year, Good Faith Partnership bolstered up the team, had an agency do a rebrand and wanted a site refresh with updated functionality.
The second build that launched in September 2023 is a big improvement in terms of user experience. It incorporates a lot more features like users being able to add multiple spaces, Space pages, a new and improved volunteer map (partnering with Rotary) so that Spaces needing volunteers can advertise themselves on the volunteer map and a improved data back end powered by Airtable so that the team can find data much more easily.
The campaign got national media coverage when the Daily Mirror chose the Warm Welcome campaign as their Christmas Appeal.
More recently, the Guardian wrote about how 500,000 people visited Warm Welcome spaces over the winter of 2022-23.
Having worked with web designers before, I can confidently say Dan is one of the best in the game. As someone with very little experience in design, Dan was able to walk me through all the different options in a thorough and simple way.
Our website is the backbone of our project and not a single a week goes by where someone doesn’t comment on how user-friendly, neat and well-designed it is!
