SASRA 100Days

I've been working with an increasing number of organisations lately in boosting the success of their various charity marketing campaigns promoting events and encouraging awareness. The most recent of these completed projects was for The Soldiers' & Airmen's Scripture Readers Association (SASRA) where I was commissioned to design and build a digital microsite to support their poignant Summer/Autumn prayer campaign. Aligned with the 100 year anniversary commemorating the crucial hundred days of events and battles that led to the conclusion of The Great War, the microsite was devised to incentivise both SASRA's current audience of supporters and potential SASRA registrants to participate in the four-month programme of goodwill and prayer.

The microsite was coded from scratch and sufficiently upheld the brand and design practises of the Client's other online territories. Its central component was driven by a very unique and creative concept that the Client had proposed; a historic timeline documenting each of the 100 Days pivotal moments spanning August-November 1918 through text, imagery and video, paired with the live calendar of SASRA's commemorative events over the same months in 2018. The technical and design implications of this component posed the greatest challenge of the site's delivery. After rounds of collaborative discussion with the Client we arrived at a hybrid solution from our pool of thoughts. A central, vertically scrolling web page would house each of the 100 content chapters, navigated via an anchored horizontal timeline of indexed date markers and a floating side-anchored group of month markets. Each of these display tools are interconnected allowing users to traverse the content coherently and with ease on any sized device; I built the site and tools to be fully responsive despite the primary audience being identified as desktop users. Furthermore, to solidify the contextual relevance of the campaign, each chapter in the timeline was built to include an independent "then" and "now" toggle, allowing users to flit between the 1918 and 2018 editions of content for each date in the 100 days.

In preparation for the launch of the campaign the Client enlisted me to satisfy one other request - to code a traffic management layer into the microsite to assist with clarity in reporting. Banner ads served at multiple external sources will drive traffic to the microsite during the currency of the campaign and the Client needed a simple solution to track its points of origin. Initially the plan was to analyse the referral URLs recorded by the site's Google Analytics installation, but by building on this, I was able to manipulate the microsite URL dependent on source of entry, thereby creating much clearer flags in the recording process.