The Henry Smith Charity was established in 1628 and is one of the UK’s largest independent grant makers making around 1,000 grants each year across a variety of grant programmes. They aim to bring about lasting change to people’s lives, helping them to benefit from and contribute to society through funding organisations that work with people to reduce social and economic disadvantage.
The primary purpose of The Henry Smith Charity website is to provide information about what they fund and how to make an application.
The previous website was outdated and not mobile friendly, built with old technology pre-dating tablets. There were not enough images, menus had become unwieldy and a bit confusing. Font and text sizes were too small with poor accessibility.
Although applications for grants were received in large numbers, many of the applicants did not fit within the grant criteria or required further input from The Henry Smith Charity team.
A clean modern responsive website design with plenty of real grant holder images and white space setting a welcoming, positive and friendly atmosphere. The final solution provided good accessibility for all visitors.
The website navigation was explored and a step by step secondary navigation for grants was introduced. Alongside this, each grant programme was given a simple qualifying criteria area enabling potential applicants to check if they qualify before beginning the application process. This greatly helped with the goal of reducing the number of ineligible applications.
We selected a typeface that would be highly readable for all users of The Henry Smith Charity Website.
