Save the Children: Because childhood means everything

Save the Children is a member-driven children's rights organization founded in 1919. The organization is politically and religiously neutral, working for long-lasting and sustainable change for children in approximately 120 countries. 

In Norway, Save the Children works to inform and influence politics. Through them, parents can get useful tips on online safety, teachers can get educational material and politicians can be influenced to make better decisions for the benefit of children. 

Internationally, Save the Children has a strong focus on fundraising in order to finance its projects. The goal is to help as many children around the world as possible: "to survive, learn and be safe!"

Save the Children is a complex organization. As they have both political and educational goals - in addition to recruitment and fundraising campaigns - this means that the target group includes companies, private individuals, schools, politicians, parents and children. This places a number of demands on the content of the website. 

The previous website was also outdated. The content structure was very messy, and the actual message - what the organization actually stands for - was not conveyed well enough.

The website was launched in 2020 and the organization was given the tools they need to have a good digital workday. 

Save the Children hopes that the users of reddbarna.no will notice a big difference.

- “The approach to the development of our website is now user-focused and insight-based. I hope that members and volunteers see that we now have a better approach and that it is easier to find the information they are looking for," says Anne Bleiklie at Save the Children.

We at Dekode continue to work closely with Save the Children on the management and further development of reddbarna.no.

Preliminary project

With complementary expertise, Dekode and communications agency, Netlife, chose to collaborate on the project. Netlife delivered the content strategy, working closely with the client according to the "core model" - a practical tool for cross-disciplinary content design that helps define what content the user needs.

- “Save the Children worked for a long time on the core model to find out what should be communicated. Those in the organization who work with children in Norway, for example, started at the bottom and went through a kind of ‘recruit school’: They took a thorough approach, produced content from scratch, reviewed with a critical eye and found the core pages. They did the same with the other topics that are most important to Save the Children," says Marius Granholt, advisor at Save the Children. Dekode.

Design and content

Save the Children has a strong brand. That's why Dekode and Netlife have not made any conceptual changes. It was more about the organization needing to formulate itself more clearly and clarify concepts - such as individual donor, regular donor and sponsor. 

They needed to focus more on issues and the results of the work they do. It was therefore an important goal to emphasize that the money donated to Save the Children actually reaches its destination, and this is shown with graphics on the website.

Development and user testing

When we develop a new website, we use the Growth Driven Design method. In short, the method is based on getting a functioning website up and running as quickly as possible, and then using real user data to constantly improve the solution. User testing is an important part of the approach and was also used on the project with Save the Children.