Designing the Future of The Outward Bound Trust

The Outward Bound Trust is an educational based charity which helps young people remove limiting beliefs by testing them through various challenges and activities. It’s truly an amazing community which is power driven to empowering young people to succeed in life.

The Outward Bound Trust approached Welford to completely transform their online image and it’s safe to say, we did just that! Our team looked at their current site at the time and worked closely with The Outward Bound Trust to conceive the ideal image.

We worked closely to the branding guidelines provided by The Outward Bound Trust to ensure the website complimented or matched the rest of the marketing material. We included a drop down menu in the admin area of all the colours used in the website, so anyone making changes or new pages will remain within the house colours of the brand.

We’ve reconsidered what the ideal customer looks for when they visit this website, and that’s why we’ve revamped the alumni stories.

The alumni stories was added into the site in order to give people who have previously attended the course a chance to share their experiences with people who are considering joining up but aren’t sure whether or not to. In addition, it's a great opportunity for them to relive their experience and reconnect with other people who have been on the same course. Originally, candidates could submit their experiences and The Outward Bound Trust would have to review it and post it online which wasted lots of time and meant that some of the best reviews were left out. The alumni stories gives candidates the opportunity to share their experience into their very own section of the website.

Our developers made the search feature so that you can only search for alumni stories that are relevant and if you’re interested you can see how far it’s come!

In the meeting that we had with The Outward Bound Trust, we discussed the customer journey, and tried to figure out the most sensible way to increase the amount of young people's lives that they could impact. In this discussion they explained that usually parents would be signing their children up to the courses, so whilst the beautiful images and videos of the experiences were almost definitely capturing the candidates attention, It was the parent that actually had to be convinced.

We then implemented all the documents regarding safety & candidate well being onto the website available to download as a PDF, which is sure to increase the total enrolment.

When we built the site, we wanted to create it so that the client could customise it themselves because on their previous site, they had little ability to customise it how they wanted to. Across the site, we created multiple different templates so that they could simply add new pages at their leisure. In the admin area, The Outward Bound Trust can drag and drop content blocks around the page so they have ultimate control of the structure and aesthetic of the page. So how did we do it? As the website was built in CraftCMS we were able to use its matrix functionality and an installed plugin called Neo. The Craft CMS’s matrix allows for some ability to customise, whereas the plugin Neo allows you to have a matrix within a matrix. This means they have full control over everything content related on their website, which is something they were really looking forward to!

As mentioned previously, the whole build was done in CraftCMS & CraftCommerce. CraftCommerce is an ecommerce plugin to CraftCMS which allows the ecommerce functionality on the website. We recommended CraftCMS to The Outward Bound Trust because we know how user friendly the platform really is. It’s features include a responsive admin area, live previews, custom fields and so much more.

The project was really fun for us all to be involved with, particularly when it came to the booking forms. The courses provided by the charity require so much medical safety & security information so its crucial the information is correct. When the client provides all the information, it’s automatically sent to the course centre, and a PDF is sent to the client. If for whatever reason the information provided was incorrect then the client is able to let the course centre before arriving to undertake their course.

In CraftCMS there are two ways of creating forms, either through HubSpot or custom built. Some of the forms on the website are set-up through hubspot which means the forms created in hubspot and embedded onto the website on whatever page you choose to include it on. The data retained from the form is sent to Hubspot’s CRM ensuring all the information is central. We understood that The Outward Bound Trust might want to have some forms where the information isn’t stored in Hubspot and that was the reason for suggesting and installing SproutForms which is a plugin. The plugin gives the user the ability to create their own form and add them to the pages - the responses are then emailed to the client and can be viewed in the admin area as well.

Finally, when we were approached by The Outward Bound Trust we were given a tight deadline to work to but we managed to turn it around from proposals to completion!