Case Study: Help for Heroes
Help for Heroes (H4H) is a UK charity that provides direct, practical support for those wounded in the line of duty since 9/11.
Before H4H was formed in 2007, they asked Innovative Consultancy to design a website that would raise £50,000 to build a swimming pool at Headley Court Rehabilitation Centre. That initial fundraising target was soon stretched to £8 million and, since October 2007, Help for Heroes has now raised a staggering £124 million for our wounded.
Innovative Consultancy formed a solid working relationship with Help for Heroes, through mutual trust and common goals. We invested time into understanding their needs, both as a working environment and as a charity. From the start, we took a ‘nothing is too much trouble’ approach, constantly developing the charity’s ideas with a proactive, visionary attitude. Due to the overwhelming growth of the charity Innovative Consultancy worked to hand over the website and online shop in January 2012 to internal teams dedicated to help the huge expansion of the charity.
Help for Heroes – website design and development
The brief:
With a huge amount of public support for our wounded – and a constant national focus on the troops in Afghanistan and Iraq – the speed of the charity’s growth has been phenomenal. Maintaining, designing and supporting all online aspects of the charity required constant flexibility and proactive development of the website’s technical elements. The main goal of the website has been to encourage donations and drive traffic to the online store, another vital source of income for the charity.
How we did it:
Since the start of the project in 2007, we developed all technical aspects of the site and managed the constant evolution of the design. From 2007-12 we worked with Help for Heroes staff to maintain the site’s content, to ensure that it was reaching the charity’s goals, and to keep it flexible enough to grow as the charity developed into a national brand.
We were very proud to be a part of the opening for the Headley Court Rehab Centre, the building of which was the first goal for Help for Heroes back in 2007. We have implemented blog software, training and multimedia uploads for all of the Big Battlefield Bike Rides, which raised over £1 million pounds of donations a year, and have provided online development for all of the charity’s other events, including the Heroes Concert and the two X-Factor singles in 2008 and 2010.
In 2009 due to the overwhelming growth within the charity we took the opportunity to redevelop the website’s information architecture, and with the increasing amount of site content has proven a structure which is still easy to navigate. The addition of a static donation button, which appears on the right hand side of the screen at all times, means that supporters can choose to donate at any point in their visit.
The result:
The Help for Heroes website receives an average of over 110,000 visits per month, and Innovative Consultancy are proud to have helped the charity reach a staggering fundraising total of £127 million during the first four years from 2007-2012.
Help for Heroes – eCommerce design and development
The brief:
Help for Heroes wanted a small online shop to sell merchandise to increase their brand awareness and to help pay for the running costs of the charity with surplus funds donated to the cause. It has grown dramatically from the ‘small shop’ that was envisaged when we built the site in 2007 and is now a vital source of income.
How we did it:
ICUK designed and developed a bespoke shop which had the character and unique style of the charity whilst meeting the needs of the charity and its customers.
We have custom developed a donations module to the shopping cart so that when a customer buys a product they are given the option of adding a donation to their order. We have also customized the back-end software used by charity staff to cut down on paperwork and allows for more efficient data collection.
We have continued to implement new strategies to meet H4H requirements, adding new modules wherever they are needed to improve customer service and help the charity get more return on investment.
The result:
In 2010 alone, the online shop received over 1 million unique visitors and made over £3.7 million in revenue. H4H are exceptionally pleased with the innovative new features we have designed, which have drastically increased productivity, and H4H Trading now works at 110% efficiency.
Help for Heroes – email newsletters
The brief:
Help for Heroes needed a way to send campaign announcements, product releases and charity news to hundreds of thousands of their supporters, at the click of a button. They needed to increase communication with their supporters while also encouraging donations and product sales.
How we did it:
During the first five years of the charity every month we worked to design, build and send an e-mail newsletters which publicised new products and increased visitors to the website and online shop. We also worked with H4H PR to produce e-mail marketing for charity campaigns, such as the recent Tesco volunteering drive and the ‘One Hour for Heroes’ campaign.
To do this, we first implemented a newsletter registration form into the main H4H website, which feeds data directly to the mailing software. We also integrated the software into the H4H online shop, so that supporters have the option to sign up to the newsletter when they buy a product.
The flexibility of the programme allows reporting on where and when a recipient opened the e-mail, what links they clicked on and all un-subscribers details. Which allows them to react to consumer needs.
The result:
The Help for Heroes e-mail newsletter reached over 175,000 supporters every month. It was one of the biggest sources of traffic for the main website and consistently performed well above industry standards:
Average open rate of 37.8% (industry standard = 20.8%).
Average click through rate of 8.83% (compared to an industry standard of 2.9%).
