Last Friday Christian Aid UK launched the initial version of their new Christian Aid Week website at www.caweek.org. Later this week we’re looking forward to the next phase coming online. HomeMade is proud to have been able to support Christian Aid’s Digital Marketing team by building the site with design created in-house by Christian Aid.

At the heart of this year’s digital experience is a move to better understand, and build, supporter relationships online including organising a vast and growing network of volunteer collectors. This will hopefully help drive additional revenue for this fantastic annual fundraiser.

This year’s Christian Aid week falls on the 9-16 May – it is the charity’s 52nd outing for its annual fundraising campaign. The event has grown massively from its initial conception when, in 1957, the first Christian Aid Week mobilised residents in 200 towns and villages across Britain. Today a network of over 3,000 local organising committees, 20,000 churches and 200,000 volunteers work to raise money; each of them is directly helping to eradicate poverty and oppression in the poorest communities around the world.

Christian Aid asked HomeMade to help with delivering an agile and user-focused site in a tight timeline. While developing the Drupal site underpinning the event we have customised an instance of Artez Interactive’s peer fundraising tool (working with Rapidata) added a mashed-up mapping and search interface and re-designed the donation pages. We hope the new site will enable Christian Aid to bring some of their relationships with supporters online and facilitate a richer experience.

At the heart of the medium term relationship vision is an integrated supporter “view” in Salesforce, with information coming from Drupal, Artez and WorldPay – we are hoping to connect their email service provider into the mix too soon.

By working with Christian Aid to refine and define the brief, we have created an area in Drupal for users to register their church, their intent to collect for CA Week or another fundraising activity they are planning. This is connected to both the Artez peer tools and a search function – supporters can search for what's been listed as happening in their area, and on a Google Map they can find out about what each church or individual is doing. In addition the site includes downloadable resources, 'where the money goes' case studies, videos, fundraising ideas and an online donation mechanism which will be updated before the start of May.

HomeMade hopes the campaign is a huge success and looks forward to more agile fun with the great CA team soon!