0 %
increase in engaged sessions YoY
0 K+
website users recorded in a single day
# 0
Google position for all ‘Coronation Big Lunch’ keywords
The client
Eden Project Communities is a non-profit organisation providing ways for people to come together, support each other and bring positive change to their community and the planet.
Through initiatives like The Big Lunch, the Network and community activity, Eden Project Communities are on a mission to build strong and resilient communities that care for each other, and are well-equipped and willing to tackle humanity’s greatest challenges together.
The challenge
Eden Project Communities tasked us with bringing new life to their website and providing a more engaging user experience for their flagship Big Lunch initiative.
Their aim: to increase the volume of relevant organic traffic to position them as the go-to place for community resources and advice by providing a flexible, engaging design system that suited the brand’s gravitas, helping them to power positive change.
The Eden Project Communities team wanted to achieve this through the consolidation of excessive and irrelevant content and through better usage of the guidance and support pages on site. Ideally, this would improve conversion rates and engagement irrespective of device used or content consumed.
Remaining consistent with the organisation’s values and mission, they needed a site available for both English and Welsh-speaking audiences that was built and designed with sustainability in mind.
Partway through the project, it was announced that Eden Project Communities were going to be running the Coronation Big Lunch that year in addition to the annual Big Lunch, posing a new challenge that impacted site content and messaging.
What we did
Our teams ran in-depth discovery sessions and research to create a refined site structure tailored to both English and Welsh speaking audiences, brought to life by creative design and underpinned by our SEO knowledge.
The SEO team worked to organise a sitemap that ensured all important pages remained on the site after the migration, and that any unnecessary content could be redirected and removed. Conducting a full content audit, they identified underperforming content to improve or remove, provided clear SEO recommendations for better optimising current traffic driving content, and content consolidation recommendations for the removal of unnecessary content.
The team created content hubs that divided content into specific sections and suggested new, traffic-driving content ideas for each content area that would resonate with Eden Project Communities audiences.
Working collaboratively with our UX team, we ensured that the sitemap organised the content in a user-friendly format, while simplifying user journeys and making content more engaging and accessible. In doing so, the site became a better representation of the work that Eden Project Communities do.
Our Experience and Web Development team worked together to produce an interactive map that users could add their events to and browse where events were happening around the country, and the map was featured on the top page of The Guardian on Coronation Weekend.
We used a number of MapBox features including address lookup and clustering combined with custom development for filtering and styling. In the back end of the site, a number of custom scripts allowed data from different sources to be imported in bulk with automatic geolocation lookups to be made on postcodes as well as form entries automatically being set as draft map locations.
When it came to translating the site into Welsh, the client no longer had clarity on what the page actually was post-translation, unless they were able to speak Welsh; our Web Development team solved this by including a field in WordPress where the English page name could be added for reference.
The results
The finished site demonstrates the engaging and interactive nature of the charity’s identity, while also delivering on all the key features the client needed.
Since the launch of the site six months ago, Eden Project Communities has seen:
- #1 Google position for all Coronation Big Lunch keywords
- 10% increase in engaged sessions
- Visitors from 239 countries
- 5,000 page views across new content hubs
- 21% increase in newsletter sign-ups in 6 months
- Peaking at 25,000+ website users in a single day
- 10% drop in bounce rate YoY
After a record year in 2022 as an official part of the Jubilee celebrations, Eden Project Communities were pleased to see they maintained high levels of traffic in 2023, increased engagement times by over 10% and drove 5,000 new users to their new community content hubs advised by our SEO team, with the majority of traffic coming from organic search.
Bounce rate dropped by 10% compared to the previous period, with load time becoming twice as fast and engagement time increasing on the site by a huge 13 seconds, highlighting their content is resonating with communities much more closely.
With 70% of users interacting with The Big Lunch map, the onsite newsletter seeing a 21% increase in sign-ups 6 months after launch, and the site becoming #1 for Coronation Big Lunch resources, Eden Project Communities is increasingly becoming the go-to place for community resources, which is just what the charity set out to achieve.
During the project, the Hallam team became an extension of our own team and not just an agency partner. Their creativity and positivity were endless and it was a pleasure to work with a technical team who helped to upskill us along the way. We’re currently working with Hallam on a follow-up project and would strongly recommend Kate, Tom, Francis and the team to any charity or NFP.
Vicky Browne, Head of Digital, Eden Project Communities
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