CIC online...


The web is the gateway to the world. If you have a question or need some advice, chances are you’ll look online to find the answer. Which is why at CIC, we wanted our website to be our online shop front – to tell people about our charity and what makes it so special and to give anybody the opportunity to find out how they can be part of our community.


At the start of this year, CIC launched a brand new website to achieve this ambition. CIC’s Communications and Marketing team tell us more…


“Twelve months ago we started planning for the new website with the aim of giving CIC the best possible online platform”, explains John Hughes, CIC’s Senior Marketing and Communications Officer. “This meant creating a site that was user friendly and easy to access; that allowed people to find out about CIC and get a sense of life in our charity; and made it easy for people to get in touch with us – whether they want to find out about the support we offer, apply to work with CIC or to volunteer with us.”


He continues, “To achieve this, we knew that we needed to plan our site in a way that offered the best possible user experience to visitors. We chose to work alongside a website agency that has a specialist understanding of making user-friendly websites and working with large complex charities like CIC and began an intensive process of research and planning with them.”


This process saw the marketing team undertake focus groups with CIC’s staff, the people we support and their friends and relatives, to find out about how they use the web and what they thought our website should offer. The team also intensively looked at the many services CIC provide and planned how to present them in the most intuitive and informative way.


Danielle Chan, CIC’s Communications and Marketing Officer explains, “When we started the project we didn’t want to make


any assumptions about how our website should look, but instead we wanted to build it around the needs, interests and abilities of people who will use it. The feedback we received from the CIC community was really the foundation of the website development and has enabled us to produce such an easy to use site.”


The feedback we received from the CIC community was really the foundation of the website development.


Over the course of the year, the team worked intensively on the project – developing blueprints for the site and planning its technical functions, overseeing its design and developing content for hundreds of pages. This January, their work


came to fruition and the site was ready to launch.


Danielle says, “It is an incredible feeling to see a site develop from being a set of blueprints on a piece of paper into a fully functioning, live website. There has been a lot of hard work put into making the site and we are so grateful to everyone who contributed to this project.”


John adds, “Since launch, the site has been a great success. We’ve had fantastic feedback from users, have seen record traffic to the site and have had lots more people get in touch to find out about how they can join CIC. We are very proud of the site but this is just the beginning to us; we are now looking forward to taking it further and introducing lots of new features over the months and years ahead.”


Finder File Edit View Go Window Help Our new site includes:


• Specially developed enquiry forms to offer enhanced customer service to people enquiring about CIC.


• A specially built support finder that allows people to find out exactly what support CIC can offer them in their region.


• Lots of great case studies showcasing the successes of the people we support and our staff.


• A dedicated professional’s zone, with information tailored to social care professionals.


• A media area filled with CIC’s award winning publications – including back issues of You First.


• Dedicated careers and volunteering sections, allowing people to find out more and apply for our work opportunities.


• Enhanced accessibility features including a ‘read aloud’ tool and translated pages.


www.c-i-c.co.uk You First | www.c-i-c.co.uk | 23


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