Building a secure and intuitive website for Be My Parent’s diverse user groups, based on a multi-faceted backend database
Introducing Be My Parent
Be My Parent is a family-finding service provided by the British Association for Adoption & Fostering (BAAF). BAAF is the leading membership organisation for people concerned with adoption, fostering and child care issues in the UK. The Be My Parent website is designed to match waiting children with adoptive and permanent foster families across the UK: raising awareness about adoption and fostering issues, while encouraging more people to consider adopting or fostering a child.
The challenge
Originally based around a printed magazine, Be My Parent had been a successful offline service for over 20 years, thus our primary challenge was to implement the service for an online platform and audience. Security was a high priority with the profiles of children in the care system appearing on the site. Another challenge was to design a site able to fulfil the needs of Be My Parent’s diverse user base: including people looking for information about adoption and fostering processes, families subscribing for the child profile search and agencies using the online system to feature children.
What we did
After carefully scoping the objectives, user groups and technological requirements for Be My Parent, the site began to fall into three distinct areas: the public face, the secure family subscription section and the agency interface. The public-facing section of the site was straightforward, with OTHERobjects CMS enabling the swift and simple upload of content by BAAF staff. The family subscription area and agency interface necessitated more complex functionality, with a powerful database replicating detailed internal processes; ecommerce for buying/renewing subscriptions, an agency invoice generator and a powerful search facility all being custom-built.
The new site enabled family subscribers and agencies to create their own accounts (after moderation by BAAF) with the site showing content specific to their subscription package and profile preferences. We also developed a media player, letting BAAF upload videos of children for adoption or fostering to the site; this proved a great success with video capturing a child’s personality better than words could do. All of this functionality was unpinned by extensive reporting capabilities, allowing BAAF to accurately measure success against defined Key Performance Indicators.
The results
The move to online has been hugely successful for Be My Parent with over 2,300 web-only subscriptions since launch and over 2,500 combined print and web subscriptions. Despite initial reluctance, agencies were quickly won over by the opportunities offered by the online service: in recent months there have been approximately 145 child profiles live on the website at any one time and these numbers are growing steadily. In 2008 over 3,700 enquiries about children featured on the Be My Parent website were made by subscribers (that’s an average of 310 enquiries per month). Ultimately, the website has helped give children in care a better chance of finding the right family.