Brand Name
YMCA
Services Offered
Digital Transformation, Internal Communication and Employee Engagement, SEO, Website and UX/UI Design
A website that grows with you
The YMCA England & Wales website is built on a bespoke in-house framework using the latest technology and WordPress platform.
The website is built using flexible content blocks to allow them to not only amend existing pages but also create completely new ones. This gives scope for their website to grow and develop with their business. This is also ideal for the rollout of the theme to local YMCAs who all offer different services and may want to modify templates.
We built in multi-level search functionality so users can easily search the website in one click which is key for service users who come to the website with a specific need.
Designed around new opportunities
The new website has been completely redesigned utilising the existing YMCA brand and assets but ensuring it’s a modern, impactful, vibrant experience to really reflect the organisation’s values and the services offered by YMCA.
Ultimately YMCA offers opportunities, safety, and hope for the future, by transforming people’s lives, and the website now reflects that purpose. We ensured users could access information quickly including their nearest YMCA, charity shop and clothing bank as well as finding out more about YMCA including an interactive history of the organisation. It also includes multiple donate links throughout the site at relevant places in the user journey to encourage additional donations on-site.
Bridging the gap
Following a piece of internal research, YMCA England & Wales were looking to improve their internal communication across the entire federation.
The federation is made up of 83 independent YMCA’s throughout England and Wales making communication and resource sharing a challenge. Staff, volunteers and trustees weren’t engaging with the current communication platform, it was lacklustre, unintuitive and cumbersome for users to access.
YMCA were looking for an intuitive internal platform to help bridge this gap, promote a more collaborative working environment and help them to achieve their wider strategy.
Say Hello to Y-Hub
We worked with the team at YMCA England and Wales to spec a brand new digital platform encompassing a complete directory, news, events, chat (including emojis and gifs of course!), resource and brand centres as well as the very competitive daily quiz. Y-Hub allows over 10,000 staff, volunteers and trustees to come together on one platform to communicate, collaborate and share resources.
The platform has been custom designed and built on Laravel and Vue as a progressive web app, allowing us to create a version of Y-Hub accessible through a browser, as a desktop, tablet or mobile app along with native push notifications. Users can search for a colleague in a local YMCA using the directory, start chatting with them, share resources or even create a group chat of colleagues with similar job roles interests to help one another.
"Harrison Carloss are an extremely talented and committed group of individuals, with a real passion for delivering for their client. They were dedicated to each step of our project, thinking about how it would be received, and how it could be developed to become even better. They care, and that makes all the difference to an organisation like YMCA."
Jerahl Hall, Senior Communications Manager