Porchlight: Partnership working at its best

3rd December 2015

Melanie Armstrong

Content Editor

Porchlight is a charity for homeless people in Kent, working in the community to address the housing, social, economic and health issues that improve people's wellbeing.

Our charity partner

We’ve been supporting and working with the charity for the past three years. As well as raising money, we’ve been providing free professional support to help the charity reduce costs and improve the use of its limited resources. We use digital to help organisations communicate and we hope that our expertise can assist Porchlight in challenging some of the stereotypes around homelessness and raise awareness of the life changing services it provides.

Our latest project

For our latest partnership project, we’re proud to have designed and developed Porchlight’s recently launched new site: www.porchlight.org.uk

When we asked Porchlight to describe working with us, they said:

Working with Deeson felt like a real partnership. They offered support when we needed it, but didn’t restrict us in what we needed to do, and embraced what we felt was important for us to achieve."

It was vital in the first instance for Porchlight to use the website to connect with the people who need support and make it easy for them to find the help they need. And on another level, to spread key messages to a larger audience and engage with a wide range of potential supporters, including community groups, local businesses and individual donors.

Donations are essential to Porchlight’s ongoing success, so it was also important to let people know what the charity is doing day-to-day and how it spends the money it receives.

Discovery first

We came in for a Discovery session and that was incredibly useful; it encouraged us to think about structure and what we wanted the site to deliver, as well as what our main objectives actually were,” says Porchlight’s PR & Communications Manager, Rachel Kelly.

That session made us really think about our main objectives – to enable people to get the help and support they need, and show the wider community what we are doing and how much the fundraising means to our service users in transforming their lives. Everyone really knows their stuff at Deeson and were able to tell us what was possible and what wasn’t, make suggestions, and help us clarify those decisions we were trying to make. The result was to develop three main strands on the new site, which overarched the main objectives: ‘Get help’, ‘Help us’ and ‘Tell us’.” says Rachel.

Deeson is as committed to Porchlight as the charity is to its clients in the community, and that has been reflected in the delivery of the website. The team wanted to bring new ideas and perspectives, encouraging Porchlight to look at things differently without compromising their main objectives and aspirations.

The results

And so far, since its launch last month, there has been a really good response, both internally and externally.

Overall, more people are coming through the site asking for support, which is positive, and in terms of fundraising, the design has made it much easier to showcase current appeals and events in a variety of different ways, so that people can see how to get involved and support us, which will hopefully translate into donations,” says Rachel.

Just being able to present everything we do, the way we work and how people can support us, has made a massive difference already,” says Rachel.