St Andrews First Aid

Case Study

Summary

As one of Scotland’s oldest charitable organisations, St. Andrew’s Ambulance Association was founded in 1882 by doctors and businessmen in the city Glasgow who were concerned with the number of people being injured in the rapidly expanding industrial city which by the turn of the 20th century had become the largest industrial city in the world.

Unlike St John Ambulance, founded in the middle ages by the Knights Hospitallers to support the Crusades, St Andrew’s growth mirrored the rise of the labour movement, with many of the first groups of volunteers established in shipyards, coal mines and on the railways.

It was run up until 2012 entirely on donations.

In 2012 St Andrew’s First Aid Training and Supplies Limited was established as a wholly owned social enterprise subsidiary to maximise profits from the sale of workplace first aid training and supplies, which is used to support the charity’s activities.

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Our Roles

Customised WordPress installation with Woo Commerce

Custom development to book course and e-learning material through an API to the e-learning training provider

Payment integration

Postcode lookup for faster checkouts

Ability to cross sell supplies when buying courses

Future integration to Sage 200 accounts to manage stock, order downloads and product information

The Challenge

The project had some unique challenges as we had varied key elements that had to have a focus.

Originally they had a site for the charity, another site for selling training and a further site to sell supplies. They needed to bring this all under one website, but clearly define the charity and the social enterprise as separate.

One of the main challenges was that the social enterprise sustained the charity in many ways and so we had to make sure that the new site retained a prominence that focussed on sales, whilst maintaining it was still essentially a charity that helped with first aiders, event cover, volunteering and so on.

Another challenge was that each and every department had its own ideas, so we had to work hard to manage the stakeholder expectations and deliver something that was equally as strong for each of the divisions.

Insights

The brand has a reputation for quality and longevity so using this we looked at how we would target each visitor to give them exactly what they needed. Some arrive looking for event cover or information on the charity, others are looking for first aid training or to buy medical supplies.

The whole brand is about providing first class first aid training and volunteering opportunities; this is what their customers are looking for.

Our Solution

We built a custom wordpress solution based on their requirements, this entailed a number of unique features which included a course booking function, a product supply shop, event cover booking forms and an eLearning product integration.

We had several initial meetings with the board and the teams that were involved to get a full understanding of what they needed for each of the sections.

The approach was to focus on the quality of their services and products through the use of case studies and videos, but we wanted to make the buying experience as simple as possible. We have continued to work on this after initial launch in order to make this as smooth as possible.

Finally, we implemented a digital marketing strategy which has been running since January 2017 and has included Google remarketing and PPC campaigns during seasonal trends along with a social advertising strategy soon to launch which will maximise customer engagement and sales.

Results

Since its launch in October 2016 the site has gone through the transition of any new website and has had some fine tuning after launch to maximise the conversions. With their previous site, they would achieve little more than a few orders a month due to its cumbersome checkout experience and poor visual presentation of the products.

Currently the new site is generating great sales and has become more even profitable since implementing the digital marketing strategy.

In the last two months since implementing the digital marketing strategy for PPC, their conversions rate has gone up 203% and we have reduced the cost per acquisition by 53%. On top of this, mobile sales have greatly increased due to the usability of the website which wasn’t an option on the previous site.