Disasters Emergency Committee

Website redevelopment and brand extension for the UK's biggest group of aid agencies.

We started working with the DEC way back in spring 2010, and managed to persuade them to come over to SiftGroups when Enable went under. They were a great client to work with - passionate, engaged, and genuinely keen to have an open, two-way relationship with us. Much better than being arbitrarily over-ruled at the last minute.

This site presented some unique challenges. Most of the time, if everything's (relatively) alright in the world, it doesn't get that many visitors. People who do come and have a look are usually after governance information or updates on appeals they donated to before.

Then when something bad happens the member agencies swing into action and it gets hundreds of thousands of hits a day. It's all about encouraging donations - the URL goes out across the media and visitors make a much more emotional response.

Our solution was to create two separate homepages. The appeal homepage (at the top here) foregrounds big, compelling images and up-to-the-minute information about what's going on. Other content is minimal to keep page weight as low as possible - it'd be massively irresponsible to risk breaking the site so we could have a textured background.

The 'normal' homepage, meanwhile, is a much more relaxed, diverse affair - there's loads on info about the DEC and what member agencies have been up to, intended to help potential donors feel completely confident in how their money is spent.

The site only launched last week and thankfully the appeal homepage hasn't had an outing yet, but feedback from donors has been overwhelmingly positive so far. Have a look for yourself - dec.org.uk.