Using digital to help more people
How we built a new help and advice website for people with drug, alcohol and mental health issues.
Last week we changed our name to We Are With You and launched our new website www.wearewithyou.org.uk.
Our acting Chief Executive Laura Bunt recently wrote about the reasons and research behind our name change. In short, we wanted a name which made it easier for people to get help, better reflecting the warm welcome people get when they come into our services.
One of our 3 organisational goals over the next 3 years is to reach many more people. This can’t be done by adding to already high caseloads, and not everyone will want or need to go to one of our services.
We need to develop new ways for people to access support and to make getting help as easy as possible. Our new website has the first of our online self-help advice and is designed to be as welcoming and human as our face-to-face services.
Getting the foundations right
Our previous website focused more on operational things like information for people looking for jobs and detail on the internal structure of the organisation. This meant that there wasn’t much there for the people using our services or who might need our support.
Due to the lack of advice on our previous website, we didn’t have much insight into what people were searching for or why they were coming to it. We had to start from scratch when thinking about how to meet the needs of people using our services and also people who might need help but prefer to get help in a different way.
This was part of a bigger project around designing more effective and human services (funded by the National Lottery Community Fund’s Digital Fund) so it was important that our new website would allow us to respond to user feedback and make changes quickly and easily.
Developing our online advice
Since it launched in 2017 our webchat service has helped over 25,000 people. Webchat gives us rich and invaluable insights into the needs of people looking for help online — people who need help but aren’t using one of our services.
There are different reasons for this. Some people don’t know how to access help or what happens in a service. Some people can’t go to a service due to its location or opening times. Others might not be ready or need to go to a service.
At the moment there are few credible online services or sources of trustworthy info out there for people looking for help, advice and reassurance around drugs, alcohol and mental health. We wanted to address this need by developing new self-help advice.
Our analysis of webchat transcripts showed that people needed advice on managing habits, cravings and triggers. They also wanted reassurance about what would happen if they visited a service.
Friends, family and people worried about someone else also use webchat. They often start by asking how they can support the person they care about and encourage their loved one to seek help. The conversations with the webchat advisors often lead to people being gently reminded that they need to look after themselves — that it’s important to put themselves first and have boundaries in place.
Our new help and advice section on the website has the first of our online support. To reflect what we see on webchat, we have divided this into help and advice for people looking for themselves and for people worried about someone else. We worked closely with the webchat team and other experts from across our organisation, mirroring the language they use and the sensitive support they offer.
Testing and retesting
Over the last few months we’ve done lots of research and testing to make sure the website is clear and easy to use.
Online help and advice is a new offer for us and this will be an area we grow and develop. Looking for help isn’t the only reason people will come to our website. People will also visit the site to make a donation or join in fundraising, to look for a job or a volunteering position, or to read more about who we are and what we do.
We tested our website with the public in libraries and community centres, and with people already using our existing services including young people. We wanted to make sure that people understood who we were and how we helped people, and that they could understand and access different types of help.
For those already using our services, we wanted to make sure that the info we were giving about our services reflected their experiences.
We got lots of useful feedback and continually iterated our designs and content based on what people told us. By the time we launched our website in February 2020, we were confident that it met the needs of our diverse audiences.
What’s next?
I’ve written before about our big ambitions. We want to design recovery services for the digital age and our new website is an exciting step in achieving this. It’s the start of thinking about how we can help people differently and this means that there is lots for us to learn.
We know lots about the people currently using our services but much less about people who aren’t. Webchat gives us some insight — our starting point for designing online advice has been looking at the transcripts of the chats. As we continue to develop our online offer, we need to grow our understanding and knowledge of a different group of people to make sure we’re meeting their needs.
Relationships and building connections are at the heart of what we do. Online support can’t replicate or replace this but we hope that the more we learn about the needs of people who aren’t currently using our services, we can develop help and advice which supports them to achieve their goals in a way that’s right for them.
This means we need to think about how we measure the impact of our online help and advice. How do we know that someone is better able to manage their cravings after reading our online advice? And how do we know that they have achieved what’s important to them if we aren’t having regular conversations or check-ins with them?
Having the website live means we can learn about what’s performing well and what’s working less well. We’ll be able to see what the most visited pages are and the search terms people are using to find help and information. This will help us to prioritise how we develop our website, particularly the help and advice section, and make sure we’re responding to user needs.
Most important of all it will help us achieve our goal of helping more people.
