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Relaunching the CRY Website |
Learnings...
The first challenge was to find out new ways Child Relief & You (CRY) could use the Net to supplement their real-world efforts, and then redesigning the existing site.
As far as the relaunch went, I learnt what it meant to approach the commercial world with a zero marketing budget, trying to negotiate for free banner space. There's so much you don't learn in classrooms!
The reward came in the form of donations and pledges that started pouring in from all around the world within an hour of the site relaunch.
... from the experience
About CRY
Child Relief & You (CRY) is an Indian non - profit organisation, founded in 1979 to enable deprived Indian children to realise their full potential. The founders of CRY realised that on the one hand, there were hundreds of voluntary organisations working with children, but facing a common difficulty - lack of resources. On the other hand, were people with tremendous potential and willingness to contribute but didn't know how to do so. CRY thus emerged as a link between those who needed support and those who wanted to give it.
CRY Online
CRY first got its presence on the WWW when different well-meaning volunteers offered to put up homepages for the organisation. CRY ended up with multiple homepages that differed since each volunteer created the pages as he saw fit.
Since the Internet is a global medium, having multiple homepages is just duplication of effort and often leads to dilution of the message. Besides since these pages were not controlled by CRY, updates were not regularly done - which amounted to harakiri in the world of Internet marketing.
In January 1997, India On Line developed and launched an official site (http://www.inindia.com/cry/) working closely with CRY. What the site offered the surfer was an online newsletter, cards that could be emailed for free, and window shopping in the form of a product catalogue (but orders placed offline). In one year, a little less than 5,000 e-cards had been emailed from the site. CRY was happy with the response to their website. But their use of the Net till then was just the proverbial tip of the iceberg - there was so much more they could use the Net for.
Redesigning CRY Online
Relaunching and marketing
In 1998, I worked with CRY and India On Line to increase the functionality and interactive elements on their site to exploit the features of the Internet. The process of redesigning the website involved expanding the goals and objectives of their online presence, re-organising the layout and content, and coming up with new strategies and ideas to make the website stand out from the clutter. We looked at using the Net in the following ways:
At the time of launching the site, the following major changes were incorporated into the CRY site:
CRY chose Anti Child Labour Day 1998, April 30th as the day they would re-launch their website. The design and webspace were provided free of cost by India On Line. Like a change of residence in the real world, changing a website address online involves creating awareness to help people find the new site among the hundreds of millions of other webpages on the Internet.
Also, to attract more visitors to the site, the site would have to be actively marketed. I handled marketing the CRY site - both online and offline. The only twist was that the site had to be marketed online and offline at no cost to CRY. The following steps were taken to market the CRY site :