Hato Hone (St John)

Background

Hato Hone St John is undergoing a long-term digital transformation. Outside of emergency ambulance services, Hato Hone St John provides a surprising array of community services supporting tamariki and rangatahi in various ways, through to services and products protecting elderly people. Their website is their biggest consumer/patient touch point beyond the physical ambulances that whizz around town.

The Hato Hone St John website consists of more than 900 pages, plus downloads and reports. It is also a portal for generating revenue, with up to 5% of donations made online, as well as the purchase of goods and services. They currently process about $20 million in transactions throughout main website and have 1.5 million unique visitors per year.

Challenge

“Our current website has been around for about a decade, relatively unchanged, and it’s a vital part of our business. But we know it’s a bit of a jungle for customers to be able to find the information they want. We needed to demonstrate the breadth and depth of our organisation, and help people understand that we’re a charity,” explains Adi Wickramaratne,  Digital Marketing & Experience, for Hato Hone St John.

Adi called on Big On Writing to help refocus the content and structure around their customers’ needs, as part of a two-year digital transformation strategy.

Furthermore, Hato Hone St John has also just rolled out a compelling brand reset that includes embracing a new te reo name along with beautiful Māori design. The objective was to further align the brand and service to Te Tiriti ō Waitangi and better connect with communities across Aotearoa, as well as reflecting their comprehensive company strategy, ‘Manaaki Ora’.  

The passionate team (including around 8,000 volunteers) have been working behind the scenes to broaden their impact in communities and the website was seen as the critical portal for telling this story.  

Solution

We were humbled that Aotearoa’s most trusted charity engaged us to look at a content audit and full rewrite and to support their digital roadmap for the future.

Phase one

A two-year staged project for Big On Writing began with phase one – a content audit. This supported a compelling business case for overhauling the site (now in the pipeline) and informed our new site content strategy that reflected the mana of their brand and the spirit of this celebrated and essential public health service.

The content audit took three months and included 20 hours of interviews with stakeholders, examining all 900 pages of the site, and making recommendations for the structure and content of the new site. Armed with a new tone of voice, Big On Writing produced a 70-page content review and content strategy road map, including a specialist te reo Māori integration recommendation.

Adi says having an outside perspective has been invaluable, and allowed touchy subjects to be broached more easily.

“Big on Writing was involved every step of the way,” says Adi. “Having their experience, abilities and outputs on board has been great – they have demonstrated a deep understanding of what we do and what we’re trying to achieve.”

He says the content audit not only delivered on what St John wanted, it had the added bonus of showing stakeholders how essential it was to invest in the digital space: “It opened a lot of eyes within the organisation.”

Phase Two

We then went on to produce a detailed new information architecture and of course ... to write, write, write for the new site.

Phase two involved a team of six writers, who created over 100 new pages of content – most of which is being used to replace the current website copy – that offers a huge step change in the way customers, supporters, volunteers and stakeholders experience the brand.  

We also produced an article SEO strategy for when the time comes to start development.  

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Result

Perhaps one of the greatest outcomes for the team has been the sense of comradery and pride we all felt on this job. We worked directly with fundraising teams who told us tear-jerking stories of survival, carried out interviews with team members in-between ambulance call outs, and listened to ‘Caring Callers’ who reach out weekly to vulnerable, lonely people living alone.

We salute the passion and mahi they carry-out day to day, and we can’t wait to see the all-new site next year!

Services

Content Audit

Content Strategy

Tone of Voice

Te reo integration

SEO Strategy

Website & Content Writing

Reference

“Big on Writing has been really brilliant to work with. They’ve always delivered, and they’ve been able to give us outputs and recommendations that have formed the basis of the business case to go to the executive team.”

‍^{Adi Wickramaratne, National Manager – Digital Marketing & Experience, for Hato Hone St John New Zealand}

“Big on Writing has been really brilliant to work with. They’ve always delivered, and they’ve been able to give us outputs and recommendations that have formed the basis of the business case to go to the executive team.”

‍^{Adi Wickramaratne, National Manager – Digital Marketing & Experience, for Hato Hone St John New Zealand}

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