If, during your school days, you ever went on a geography or biology field trip, the chances are that you went to one of the Field Studies Council’s (FSC’s) 29 centre locations.
FSC centres are located in some of the most stunning rural locations in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Each year more than 165,000 people visit its centres.
The first ten comparable weeks of operation saw an increase of over 40% in the number of ecommerce transactions over the same period in the previous year.
FSC isn’t just about GCSE and A-level field trips either. Its centres also serve as never-to-be forgotten venues for primary school trips.
FSC provides an extensive collection of natural history, arts, wellbeing, and training courses. Its publications are used by students, teachers and naturalists, young and old.
FSC works in partnership with education authorities to improve the mental wellbeing of children by taking the classroom outdoors.
And it is leading a UK-wide, environmentally focused programme supporting young people to lead change in their communities and local environment.
The challenge
Its tired old website was failing to communicate FSC’s rich set of services. It didn’t show that FSC is more relevant now, when environmental awareness is so important, than it’s ever been.
Even when a user knew they wanted to find out about courses or school field trip opportunities, the old site’s labyrinthine user experience discouraged all but the most determined.
Our solution
We started by working with FSC to identify and understand its audiences, and what was most important for them.
Our content design approach enabled us to restructure content from existing sources – about school courses and trips; natural history, art and other courses; centres; and publications – to better serve users.
FSC’s unique back-office processes meant that we had to develop a custom ecommerce solution based on WordPress, WooCommerce and Stripe, with course bookings posted to FSC’s Cinolla-based bookings system.
Outcomes
The new site is a celebration of FSC’s unique role as one of the UK’s most important environmental education charities – enabling people at all stages of life to have first hand experiences in the outdoors.
The first ten comparable weeks of operation saw an increase of over 40% in the number of ecommerce transactions over the same period in the previous year.
