Help Musicians
Creating a world where all musicians thrive
Developing a more accessible and inclusive charity website that generates income.
What we did
- Content strategy
- Website design and build
- Sustainable web development
- Fundraising modernisation
Impact measured against UN Sustainable Development Goals
Help Musicians is a charity for professional musicians of all genres, both in work and in retirement. They help in times of crisis, but also in times of opportunity, giving people the support they need at the crucial stages that could make or break their career.
By providing genuine help when musicians need it the most, they have an incredible reputation across the sector. They enjoy a strong influence to make changes that affect the whole industry, having lead on matters such as mental health and hearing loss.
Over the pandemic, Help Musicians further enhanced their reputation by rapidly providing grants to over 20,000 musicians to help them make ends meet. Their goals for the website project were to reach musicians who currently didn’t know that they could access support from the charity.
Many of these people do not use the same technical language as funders often do, so a large part of the project was to simplify how Help Musicians talked about their work.
In addition, the charity has been looking to modernise its fundraising efforts. Creating an accessible and inclusive fundraising platform as efficiently as possible has been a huge step forward for the fundraising team.
It’s been such a pleasure working with the William Joseph team. The website launching feels like we’ve now got a platform to truly move forward our digital comms.
Help Musicians
Accessible support for musicians
All funders want to help those most in need. However many use deeply technical language to describe the support that they deliver.
This inadvertently excludes people who are not expert in applying for funding – the very people they want to reach.
Help Musicians have avoided this by using simple, accessible words to describe the different ways people can receive money and support from them.
Modern fundraising journeys
Much of Help Musicians’ funding comes from gifts made in wills. To help more musicians in times of need, they wanted to better mobilise support from music lovers across society.
To do that they need a suite of modern fundraising tools including events, self-fundraising and online donations.
The initial project was limited in how much we could change the existing donation tools due to ongoing CRM development. To help generate as much support as possible, the donation pages themselves were fully redeveloped even though the experience is yet to be.
High-value content that helps musicians and supporters
As with many charities, Help Musicians creates content that meets the needs of their supporters and those who they help. Modern charities understand that these are not two distinct groups with separate needs, but usually the same people at different stages of life.
The website’s most valuable content is that which meets the needs of all these people, no matter their context. For Help Musicians this is content that shows the people they have supported over the years.
It illustrates to musicians the kind of support they offer, while showing existing supporters where their money goes and inspiring new people to give.
Putting musicians’ voices first
Help Musicians deeply understand and care about their audience. They are truly at the heart of each decision they make. By showcasing real people’s perspectives across the site, we can illustrate their work better than any marketing or communications materials.
Sustainable website development
Help Musicians are acutely aware of the climate crisis. With the events industry being responsible for generating significant amounts of carbon we are keen to ensure that their digital channels are as sustainable as possible.
By implementing green hosting and ensuring that the website’s development was as low bandwidth as possible we drastically reduced its environmental footprint.
86%
Reduction in carbon emitted by each website visit
