Digital Strategy
The National Garden Scheme is a charitable organisation whose mission is to provide access to over 3,700 private gardens across the UK.
J B Cole partnered with Hype London to overhaul the NGS website in order to increase attendance at their gardens. The smoother user journey provides an abundance of useful website functions to make browsing, searching and visiting gardens more straightforward for existing and prospective visitors.
The Challenge
The NGS raise millions of pounds every year for nursing and health charities including Macmillan, Mind and Parkinson’s UK through their open gardens. J B Cole were really excited to take on the challenge of improving their online offering alongside Hype London, a creative partner agency.
The Impact
To deliver on the client’s vision, the team at J B Cole started with making improvements to the Find a Garden functionality while introducing a new online booking system to allow visitors to book trips to their garden of choice.
They then linked this up with the NGS e-Commerce shop to combine ticket sales with merchandising and charity donations, creating a more united and user-friendly website experience. As well as this, J B Cole added a separate section which allows the purchase of promotional material and improved the member management system to increase the functionality of the site.
The Results
This project continues to drive performance for NGS. Overall, the project improved the look and feel of the website whilst maintaining and building on its functionality to boost the user experience. Improving search functions and the site performance was key to delivering on the client’s challenge.
“I wanted to make this statement that what we have achieved with the website over the last couple of months we could not have achieved this time last year.
Being able to add virtual garden visits, remodel pages to turn our attention to fundraising rather than garden visits, and then switching our focus back again, adding gardens to the shop as products – would all have been 100% not possible 12 months ago. Throughout this I have been able to keep the organisation digitally agile with the full confidence that we had a stable website that has been designed to enable us to be flexible.
Tony, Richard and everyone at J B Cole and Hype thank you for getting us to the stage where we can adapt to whatever the world throws at the organisation.“
Joanne McGowan, Digital Development and Infrastructures Manager | National Garden Scheme
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