The Yorkshire Children of Courage Awards is a fantastic awards night founded in 2011 and is aimed at recognising courageous young people in the Yorkshire area. Their awards night covers two age ranges: 0-12-year-olds and 13-18-year-olds and awards are given out for the bravest person, the best fundraiser etc. It is a truly spectacular event and sponsored by the amazing St James’s Place Foundation Charity.
Last month, we launched the new Yorkshire Children of Courage Awards website, to coincide with their Launch Party on the 5th May. It was a great project to work on and as the cause is very close to our hearts it was great to be involved in designing & developing the website. Ascensor has supported this charity for many years; we subsidised 50% of the development costs of the site build, we also sponsor the 0-12 years old, Special Recognition Award.
The Build
Yorkshire Children has seen year-on-year growth since 2011 and had outgrown their old website. Their specifications was a website that would be up to date with current technology and would aid them for years to come.
We built the website using WordPress content management system as wanted a website that’s easy to manage, colourful and heavy on images to mirror the charities personality.
A big problem with the old website is that it wasn’t content manageable; we made this one of our key requirements and built a website to have complete flexibility over managing content on the majority of the website.
We ensured the site is fully mobile responsive – more than half of internet users use their mobile phone as their primary internet usage device – we wanted to ensure any user, no matter what device, can nominate a child to be entered for an award.
The award nominations were the feature the website would be centred on. We ensured that all nomination entries could be managed in WordPress easily and could be exported to excel. Each nomination sponsor and description can be easily amended. If any new awards were created, they could easily add them to the page and in turn future-proofing the website. For the user, we made it as easy as possible to vote for one award or several by using a JavaScript function to retain contact details across all the forms.
Other features of the website we added were the integration of Stripe – a payment provider – so users could book tickets or tables straight from the website. We added a visual event calendar so Yorkshire Children could show all their events in a calendar format and link to these directly off social media.
Rosemary, responsible for marketing, PR and sponsor relation for Yorkshire Children said “This was a super smooth development project. The design team proposed a design solution that is contemporary, on brand and colourful - we are delighted with it! The build process was on track throughout - we had to hit a deadline of end April so that when we held the Awards launch party on 5th May people could go straight onto the site and nominate an individual or take part in the Group vote. The team at Ascensor were exceptionally helpful thought out - keeping us informed if they needed additional content providing. Part of the process involved a training session on the CMS which was also expertly handled. Looking forward to working with Ascensor again on other projects.”
Our help
We’re very much looking forward to attending the annual Yorkshire Children of Courage Awards 2016 on 14th October 2016 and meeting the courageous young people in Yorkshire who are nominated, it’s always a wonderful evening with several celebrity appearances such as One Directions, Louis Tomlinson. You can get your ticket here.
We are immensely proud to have designed and developed the Yorkshire Children website and played our part in enabling the awards night to grow in the way it has. Giving back to the community through corporate social responsibility is something Ascensor firmly believes in. We cherish in giving our time or financial resource to supporting the charities efforts and enabling it to carry out its fantastic work.
Read more about the Yorkshire Children case study here or if you want to speak to us about your charity, contact us today.