Wai Yin Society

Wai Yin Society is a social welfare charity based in Manchester’s City Centre. Established since 1988, it has long served the Chinese and other ethnic communities. They have been supporting, empowering and working in partnership with Chinese individuals and families for more than 25 years. Founded in 1988 by a group of community-minded Chinese women, Wai Yin has become one of the largest Chinese Community centres in the UK, sustaining its operations through commissions and contracts with mainstream organisations. As the society has grown, we have developed a range of employment, education and community services for Chinese men and women and for other ethnic minority groups, including Somali, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Indian and many European nationalities.

Client

Dr Sylvia Sham, Wai Yin Society

Project Status

Published

Launch Date

February 2014

Challenge

As a small local charity, Wai Yin has always managed all of its marketing and media in-house, which put a lot of stress and strain on its human resources. In addition to creating posters and flyers, the staff were required to post information on their website, which had not been updated for three years and was quite complicated to maintain.

The brief was to create a new website, powered by WordPress, which could be updated by all staff members and volunteers.  There would be a core administration and maintenance team.  From here, additional features could be added such as event promotion and report publication.

Solution

Being a long-term supporter of the charity, I stepped in to breathe new life for their material. This started from rebuilding their website from the ground up, moving from a Joomla system to WordPress, which was simpler for the staff to navigate. The site was redesigned completely to allow for greater content space, as the older design was very limited for content space. In addition, new charity hosting was sourced from Unlimited Web Hosting, a trusted web host of mine. The project originally took six months, including collecting new information from staff to launch. It was unveiled at their Chinese New Year banquet dinner in 2014.

Since then, the site has been redesigned again, and the new site was ready for launch around the end of 2016. The new site incorporated a better events section, photo galleries, and donation capabilities.  It also moved to a different web host - Kualo - which has become a preferred hosting option for non-profit organisations.  In addition, their charitable status unlocked donations from Microsoft in their Office 365 services.  The next stage of their promotional strategy will involve Google Ad Grants.

Printed material was also designed in-house, using standard Microsoft Office software packages (due to budgeting constraints). Taking this into consideration, I worked using Microsoft Publisher to create editable layouts that would not look out of place in InDesign and created a stunning layout with beautiful graphics. Much of this style is being incorporated into their forthcoming fundraising pack.