0800 What’s Up

The Problem

0800 What’s Up is the most accessed professional telephone counselling service for children and young people in New Zealand. It costs nearly $800,000 annually to operate 0800 What’s Up, and more than 95% of its funding comes through the generosity of New Zealanders who want to make a difference to children’s lives. 

0800 What’s Up had an extremely outdated website, and they had been re-directing their web traffic to their Facebook page.

As part of a larger package of work to re-do the Barnardos website, Signify offered to do a new 0800 What’s Up website pro-bono.

What We Did

As phase one of the project, Signify ran a workshop with the What’s Up team to establish the business needs of the site, which are:

• information architecture and design that works for children, teens, and adults
• information and resources to supplement the helpline service for times when the service could not answer calls
• interactive content and functionality that is engaging and relevant to its audience – this can include embedded media, user generated content, and social media integration
• information that would encourage support and funding

We then developed information architecture and wireframes based on these business needs. The key feature was splitting the site into three separate “sub-sites” for children, teens, and adults. This allowed content to be targeted in an age-appropriate way without cluttering other areas of the site.

Our design partner, Cato Partners, took our wireframes and produced the final design. We worked closely with them throughout their design process, particularly around how the site would scale to the smaller mobile device screens.

Drupal was the new Content Management System of choice for Barnardos (as used on the main Barnardos website). The functionality required for the new What’s Up website was relatively simple – largely available within Drupal anyway.

So the bulk of the work for us in delivering this site was the integration of Cato’s design into a new Drupal theme for the site, and implementing the three “sub-sites” for each audience type to match the information architecture.

Technology Used

Drupal 7