Bright Paths

Bright Paths believes in early intervention, stepping in to prevent early signs of challenges from developing further. Since starting in 2021, they have helped nearly 500 young people in the UK, and the impact of their services is evidenced by numbers such as 92% showing emotional improvement in their SDQ.

I crossed paths with the charity at the end of 2023. Like most non-profits, they had skilled and motivated staff but were missing the technical and creative skills to attend to their website and socials.

They were struggling to communicate their initiatives and motivators consistently.

Key challenges identified:

• While done professionally, they didn’t care for their branding
• They were struggling to effectively communicate their initiatives
• Uploading blog posts was hard despite the popular CMS used
• They had a slow and tedious offline referral process

Despite the original plan being to fix some bugs and re-align the website’s look and feel, I quickly advised a full website redesign and site structure. 3 months later, we had streamlined and simplified their efforts, and they were surprised by the potential their branding had been sitting on for all these years.

I complimented their colour palette and logo icon in our first call. To my surprise, they felt differently about their brand, as it had first been presented with a lot of potential which had later let them down.

Seeing that as even more motivation to do their branding justice, I took it upon myself to really maximise its potential:

• turning their logo icon into a variation of borders
• implementing 1-2 brand colours to nearly all photos
• creating other visual elements based on shapes in the logo
• using the ratios between the logo colours to create shapes and boxes

I dedicate my heart to every non-profit project I take on and make sure I understand the ins and outs of their initiatives and the struggles of their beneficiaries.

Only then do I know how to best lay out the website structure, what information is needed and when.

As one of the most hands-on people I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with, the communication with CEO Natashia was seamless – with me asking questions about everything from registration details and certifications to targeted questions regarding their services.

To build a new and more successful website for Bright Paths, I focused on 3 key elements:

01. Ease of use

When we first started working together, they had published a total of five blog posts in all of 2022 and 2023. Not because they didn’t have anything valuable to post, but because they felt defeated doing so.

By mid-March, seven posts had been published in 2024 alone. We’ve said goodbye to a tedious task of having to set up a template for every post, to now having one set core template with different layout variations available for different content types.

Similarly, they were struggling to add any new sections, such as their impact statement. Preparing for the future, they now have a range of branded layout types that are fully responsive across devices.

A final highlight is reusable content – making it easy to update the stats of their impact statement across the website with just one click.

02. Structure

While the original website had an alright site structure, I cleaned things up and made essentials more accessible. One service, for example, was hidden as a blog post. By focusing on the funnel, we simplified different user journeys.

For those in need of immediate help, we also added an accessible toggle from all pages to their wellbeing advice page.

03. Communication

Coming in as an outsider without prior knowledge of their specific initiatives is often useful as I’ll read and analyse their messaging more similarly to potential beneficiaries and supporters.

By digging and asking questions, I refined their content to be more to the point, provide the information people would be the most interested in, and making things more engaging by focusing more specifically on the impact and benefits of their services.

Rather than dumping content on their visitors, we tailored the experience to match their intentions.

You can see a lot of these changes coming together in the before-after example below, showing their old “support” page on the left, and the new on the right. This has a clearer copy and navigation, the photographs complement the branding and you can see some of the branded graphics in action.

One of the main highlights of the project are the new digitised referral forms.

Their old process would be for referrers to request a form > the Bright Paths team to send this over via email as a PDF > referrer would fill in the PDF and send it back to Bright Paths.

The new process is for the referrer to simply fill in the form directly on the website.

The old process had one form for each type of service, and even then some questions might not be relevant to everyone. Now, with conditional logic, all forms are combined to one and the questions displayed vary depending on the unique referral.

To help with their social media efforts moving forward, I set up a range of branded templates for them in Canva. I also set up a few posts to help promote the new website when we launched it.