British Friends of Harvard Business School

The British Friends of Harvard Business School (BFHBS) grants scholarships to British students to study at Harvard Business School, and runs an outreach programme encouraging people from non-traditional backgrounds - state schools, first-generation university students, people already working in the NHS or civil service - to consider an MBA they might never have thought was open to them.

BFHBS' old website didn't reflect the calibre of what it does or make it easy to support. There was no way to donate online at all, no way to organise or promote events through the site, and their small team had no simple way to update it themselves. For an organisation trying to reach people who'd never heard of a British Friends group or an MBA scholarship, a weak, static website was a genuine barrier to growth.

We simplified the new website's navigation entirely, removing the subnav in favour of a small set of clear, one-click links - a change that also made the site easier to navigate by keyboard, an accessibility improvement that matters for an organisation trying to reach as wide an audience as possible.

We designed a new logo and brand identity for BFHBS, giving it a visual presence that matches the seriousness of what it does, developed through multiple design directions down to a final mark, produced in versions with and without the full name for different uses.

Donations moved onto Giant Giving, our own donation platform - BFHBS' first way to take online donations at all, supporting both one-off and recurring giving. Behind the scenes, we trained BFHBS thoroughly on both the CMS and the donation platform, so their small team could run and update the site confidently themselves.

BFHBS can now do things online it simply couldn't before - and just as importantly, do them in one place. The charity's Chairman described the previous site as unable to take donations or help organise events at all; within months of launch, an event had been booked and paid for entirely through the new site.

A newsletter sign-up integration with MailChimp also gave the charity a proper route to build and communicate with a mailing list for the first time. For a small team without spare capacity, having donations, events, and email sign-up all connected through a single platform means less time spent stitching different tools together, and more time on the work that actually matters.

The platform has held up reliably throughout, with uptime in its first year comfortably exceeding the standard BFHBS was promised - including through a period of real growth for the charity. That reliability matters beyond the numbers: it gives a small organisation the confidence that the platform can keep pace as they continue to grow, not stall a few years down the line.

Six months after launch, BFHBS came back to Giant Digital asking for a proposal on further marketing support - a strong sign the platform had already started proving its worth.