Wotton Area Mutual Aid (WAMA) and
The Keepers Community Hub
5 days to public Beta?! After watching (with great admiration) a small group of like-minded people in my community set up a response to the Covid-19 lockdown restrictions using little more than a Facebook page and a bunch of Google forms, I was in awe. And yet I could see the same questions being raised by residents when they couldn’t find the information they needed quickly enough. What was needed was a site that would act as a hub for all the work and resources they’d put together… and it was needed FAST.
“You don’t have to find the perfect answer. Start making, start doing, and figure out how to make it better.”
— Coe Leta Stafford, IDEO-U Executive Design Director
Understanding audience needs
The quickest way to understand the work that WAMA were undertaking and some of the potential holes in the service was to spend some time talking to their volunteers, particularly the steering team. Their in-depth knowledge of the system they’d set up helped me gain an understanding of the journeys taken by their key audiences: those in need of help, WAMA volunteers and local businesses keen to increase trade whilst maintaining distancing measures.
After speaking to some local business owners and residents in the area, I had a rough picture of what was working well and what needed additional support. The most frequent questions were: ‘How do I get help for my relative if I don’t live in the area but they do’?, ‘Where can I buy XYZ?’.
A simple, goal-orientated IA
Since our key audiences are relatively distinct, the site is structured by need. ‘Get help’, ‘Volunteer’ and ‘Shopping for…’ form the main navigation links, with prominence also given to ‘WAMA Boxes’ (a non-means tested box of essential groceries for anyone who needs it) and ‘Donate’.
In order to keep the site to as low-cost as possible it also needed to be under 15 pages, so business information is shared on single ‘shopping for…’ topic pages rather than being pushed onto deeper pages.
3 years on - a Community Hub
The WAMA site was a welcome tool for communicating WAMA’s service. Its became a quick reference for users needing to understand which local businesses were open and what services available, and a central point for fundraising donations.
Once the lockdowns were lifted and residents and businesses could return to operating more freely, the core WAMA team paved the way for a permanent community hub. The Keepers Community hub opened in 2021 and has thrived ever since.
The Keepers community hub website, which I designed and built, has evolved from the original WAMA response to the covid-19 lockdowns, and is now a central communication tool for our thriving community hub.