Compost London
A co-produced bespoke new website and refresh of their brand identity.
Let's Set The Scene
Compost London is a Community Interest Company (CIC) that exists to support the voluntary and community sector in East London to grow and develop.
Set up in the face of diminishing infrastructure support and increased needs, Compost London works to give organisations the freedom to take up new projects, to be experimental and to be more responsive in the way they work.
Compost London’s team of community development professionals have mapped out a menu of services to support and maintain a robust and thriving voluntary sector, from personalised mentoring to organisational strategy development.
The Compost London goal is simple: to help your voluntary organisations grow, develop, and thrive.
The Challenge
Through taking on more work and bigger contracts, Compost London has grown more quickly and more formally than the founders anticipated.
They were working with a simple website which had grown organically as new projects and services have been added. So they needed to develop a site where people in the sector could find the information they needed more easily as well as being a space to reflect what the organisation is about, to showcase its successes and to do all of that in partnership with the people they work with.
Working through the Big Lemon Discovery process, Compost London identified some specific challenges that the new website needed to address:
- The organisation is quite fluid in how it grows so the site would need to balance the needs of the organisation as a whole and the significant different projects within it. It was important to ensure that the key projects and the funded offerings were showcased to make the offering really clear.
- Another challenge of balance was reflecting the needs of the people with whom Compost London co-produces work and the organisations with which it collaborates.
- Co Production is important in ensuring Compost London can connect and collaborate with its stakeholders, but can be challenging in asking for time/resources from small, emerging groups. They ensured organisations were paid for taking part in Coproduction sessions.
- As the organisation has grown rapidly, it has added lots of different software platforms for things like CRM and event management. This has created layers of complexity in integrating these into something that offers a more user-friendly experience.
Facilitated by Big Lemon, coproduction was an important part of the website development process. It started with the senior team considering the strategic aims for the project then included the wider staff to dig into what ‘felt like Compost London’ as an organisation and what information should be front and centre.
Wider sector coproduction sessions involved representatives from small and emerging organisations who were shown a first version of the website and asked for their feedback and thoughts.
“One of the key features we were working to get right for users was the Resource library. Big Lemon were really helpful with this - we didn’t know what was possible and they helped us navigate through a complex set of resources with great advice on how we tagged and filtered content to make the process of finding it logical and user friendly”
Briony Fleming, Director, Compost London
As the organisation continues to grow and evolve the website has been built to adapt in response to its needs. The Compost London team will be able to add new projects over time, as well as building new case studies, creating news stories and promoting events.
The Tech bit
Our most significant use of the Webflow CMS to date: Dynamic project listings that seamlessly integrate resources from every corner of the site, including News, Events, and Community Resources, creating an ecosystem that grows with Compost London.
Comprehensive automation to populate AideCRM and Mailchimp whenever an inquiry or mail subscription is submitted, ensuring a streamlined and efficient process.
The Outcome
Working with Big Lemon has given us the opportunity to develop a much more communicative, lively and effective website that has longevity.
It will give anyone visiting a much better, deeper understanding of what we do as an organisation and help us to communicate to funding bodies what we, and our partner organisations, are delivering.
For those we support, they will have much easier access to all of the valuable information and resources that we can offer. And we’ve built that system in a way which enables us to continue to add to and enrich that offer.
It will help our teams to communicate what they do and to more easily upload information, while also helping them with specific practical tasks, like setting up and promoting events.
“It’s like a dream - it’s so much easier to use and present what we do professionally. The way Big Lemon has set the site up means it walks you through the process of adding content so you don’t forget vital information. Once the whole team is trained up, it will make work easier, save us all time, and reduce the distance between getting information in, and being able to share it in a user-friendly way.”
Briony Fleming, Director, Compost London
Why Big Lemon?
“We really valued having Big Lemon on board to lead the co-production sessions as it meant that all of our staff could fully participate in the journey.”
“The team are super-friendly, helpful and patient - they’ve been very reassuring about managing the complexity of the challenge and helping us to make sense of all the material we wanted to include.”
“They come with a real ‘yes we can’ attitude - they’ve been very solutions-focussed and really clear at explaining things at every step of the way.”
“Working with Big Lemon, we’ve been able to build something that truly represents us as an organisation and we’re already getting lots of positive feedback on the changes we’ve made.”
“I would highly recommend them to anyone, it was a great experience”
Briony Fleming, Director, Compost London
