Celebrating Freedom at The Shelter for Abused Women and Children

The challenge of creating a website for a domestic violence agency is how to avoid the shock and awe approach used by so many agencies.  This wasn’t a public relations website development strategy that anyone wanted to pursue.

When creating a new look for The Shelter for Abused Women & Children’s website, Social-Impact sought to illuminate the obvious challenges faced by victims of domestic abuse, but also send a public relations message of hope and support, inviting the community to become a part of the solution as well as provide much-needed advocacy information for victims of abuse.

Since over half of the traffic to the website was performed using a mobile platform, it was essential to have a mobile friendly website that would accommodate a mobile user.

The Shelter engages a large list of community volunteers and conducts numerous outreach programs. Social-Impact needed to create a lively site that volunteers would want to visit and revisit again.

This return strategy was to be accomplished by developing a website to display events and activities and the fun involved while still accomplishing a much needed service in the community. It needed active photo galleries, and YouTube videos to help tell that story and create “social media sharing” opportunities.

Having a great website isn’t enough, however. Once the website is developed, a method of outreach was needed to bring people back. A rich social media integration was necessary in all forms of the online platforms.

A new newsletter template was created that shared a general greeting, and many places to engage newsletter recipients with a reason to learn more. This included photo gallery links to the website, as well as YouTube videos showing lively activities and fun, engagement and outreach.

In addition, event summaries were provided with links back to the website event calendar with the opportunity to sign up.

Donations are also a vital part of continuing the Shelter’s services, so a secure site was developed that would allow the community to pay for programs and make donations on a secure platform to ensure safety and comfort to the online user.

The selling of a fulfilling and successful future has begun.