The Brief
The CHS Alliance’s website is one of its main communications tool for reaching humanitarian and development sectors. It is a vital resource for reaching the target audience.
Having had website built in 2015 on the not so well-known Nifty CMS, the CHS Alliance required something more up-to-date and scalable; a fit-for-purpose website, with greatly improved UX that better surfaced content and simplified the member sign-up process.
It was clear that this website redesign was a huge opportunity to reduce administrative costs for the CHS alliance, and drive towards their organisational mission; to promote respect for the rights and dignity of people and vulnerable communities. By moving some of the more mundane processes online, we saw a chance to improve usability, enhance user satisfaction and increase membership sign-up and retention, helping more and more organisations to provide support in-line with core humanitarian standards.
The Client
The CHS Alliance is a global alliance of humanitarian and development organisations committed to making aid work better for people.
Forming in 2015, the alliance brought together the Humanitarian Accountability Partnership (HAP) International, a multi-agency initiative working to improve the accountability of humanitarian action to people affected by disasters and other crises. Together, the CHS Alliance and HAP have more than two decades of experience in supporting the sector to apply standards and good practices.
The alliance are headquartered in Geneva and maintain a presence in London. They are a movement to strengthen accountability and put people affected by crisis at the heart of what they do by applying the Core Humanitarian Standard (CHS).
Our Solution
Our solution comprised of four parts:
- Redesign and rebuild using a scalable CMS
- Increase memberships sign up by simplifying membership management and registration
- Make event registration / payment easier for end-users
- Showcase Core Humanitarian Standard reporting data and visualisations in an engaging way
Despite the previous website serving the CHS Alliance well for three years, the membership and event registration/payment process was too cumbersome for all those involved.
Designing a fresh new website meant we could not only give the site a facelift, but we could also make essential processes simpler and more cost-effective. Bringing membership and event registration into the 21st century by having them on the website lowered barriers-to-entry and paint points to prospective organisations and event attendees.
Forward to 2024, and the CHS Alliance website is still serving it’s members, retaining users and continuing to support the humanitarian sector meet Core Humanitarian Standards.
The Tech
The website was built using WordPress, MySQL and Nginx. Some of the data visualisations are using D3, with some of the form registrations using the WordPress plugin Gravity Forms.
Having undergone an accessibility review in 2023, we carried out some accessibility improvement to ensure the CHS Alliance website is compliant with ADA and meets level AA requirements.
