After the success of the Compass Group website, the School and Public Health Nurses Association (SAPHNA) approached us to revolutionise the way they engage with their members online. The aim was to switch their business model from free to paid, with an emphasis on value, community and social responsibility.
Our initial kick-off meeting was arranged in the historic Sheffield City Hall conference rooms which could only mean one thing – historical road trip!
We met with Sharon White and the SAPHNA leadership team and discussed the vision they have for their website. We were also fortunate enough to meet with some of the website’s users, including school nurses and members and this helped to really inform the needs of the community.
Research had shown that SAPHNA had been growing consistently within the community of public sector nurses and the website was not built to handle the strains of high traffic and social media integration. We proposed a community driven solution that puts discussion and knowledge sharing at the forefront, using the combination of a forum and membership area.
As expected, many of the SAPHNA users access the site using mobile devices, so this was a key factor in the design, particularly the forum where it was our hope that engagement would build around key issues within the public nursing sector.
The following weeks, sprints and revisions helped to slowly bring the whole thing to life as we collaborated during the build with the SAPHNA Editorial Board, a group of key representatives that were instrumental in the content creation.
The result is a WordPress driven membership site with full payment options and a tiered set of member groups. Alongside this, SAPHNA can now look forward to developing a vibrant and informative forum community that puts patient care at its heart.
