Using social networking and discussion forums to connect carers around the UK through the Princess Royal Trust for Carers website.
Introducing the Princess Royal Trust for Carers
The Princess Royal Trust for Carers is the largest provider of comprehensive carer support services in the UK. The Trust offers information, advice and support services to around 310,000 carers, through its 144 independently-managed Carers Centres; 85 Young Carer Services and interactive websites.
The challenge
The Princess Royal Trust for Carers came to us for a website redesign in 2005. Carers had been experimenting with discussion boards on their existing website and wanted to take this experimentation further. There was growing recognition internally that carers.org was a vital communication channel between carers and the charity and amongst carers themselves. The new site needed to look better, be simpler to manage, easier to find online and extend the growing community of carers nationwide.
What we did
Flexible content management is central to the Carers website project with our CMS OTHERobjects being adapted and extended to include message boards and Intranet functionality. These additional features support communication and knowledge sharing between the 144 Carers Centres across the country.
Faceted search makes Carers’ rich collection of articles easier for first time and returning visitors to explore. While our publication model automatically cross-references community threads with the articles database, so that a message board thread about Alzheimer’s can be accompanied by links to resources and articles on the same topic.
The results
The Carers website has helped bring carers together, enabling them to share advice, thoughts and feelings with each other. Engagement levels are high, with discussion boards being well populated and new conversations appearing every day. Web usage statistics reinforce this high level of engagement with a return visitor rate of 45 per cent. The Forum and Help Directory are consistently the top two content areas, reinforcing Carers’ objectives of increasing interactivity and access to resources.