Industry: Charity

The South Bedfordshire branch of the RSPCA is an independent animal welfare charity. They already had a website which I rebuilt in August last year.

They are always looking for ways to increase donations to the branch and with my experience in affiliate marketing I suggested they serve banner ads for a relevant advertiser. I belong to a few affiliate networks and Affiliate Window (AW) already had some pet supplies companies on-board. I picked Monster Pet Supplies for their nice commission, 30-day cookie and the fact that they supply Waitrose with Pet products.

Unfortunately their creative selection was a bit lacking, in terms of target audience, they all targeted dog owners. So I set to with the GIMP to create some new banners which are more relevant for South Beds RSPCA audience – predominately cats, rabbits and guinea pigs.

A few hours later and I had a range of in-content squares, 468×60 and half banners for use on the site, a few days later they made their first commission from a click. To expand on this monetisation I plan to pull the AW XML product feed to create more opportunities for commissions by placing product links selectively and more creatively.

In the interim, here are some banner ads!

The South Bedfordshire branch of the RSPCA is an independent animal welfare charity. They already had a website which was established in 2002 and had undergone a few redesigns over the years but it needed to be updated to take advantage of responsive web design techniques. It’s a popular site with about 3,000 visitors/month.

The old website also had no way for the stakeholders to update content on the website themselves. This meant information was frequently out-of-date, there was however a rudimentary method for updating the animals that were available for adoption.

The redesign and transfer into WordPress took around 2 weeks to complete. There wasn’t a particularly large amount of content to transfer across but it did need need restructuring to make this information easier to locate.

A Custom Post Type was built to facilitate the adding and categorisation of new animals for adoption. New image sizes were added to automatically create a range of images for use in the template when an image is uploaded through the WordPress media library.

A custom function was built onto the GravityForms plugin pre_render hook to make their adoption enquiry form more intuitive by dynamically replacing checkboxes with animal images.

This project is an ongoing one, as part of my volunteering role as a cat fosterer for the branch. Future additions include a better donation/sponsorship process, automated new animal email alerts and training to key staff within the branch on using and updating the blog and new animals.