Global Link has embarked on a digital design process, as part of the CATALYST National Lottery Funded programme

This month Global Link has embarked on a digital design process, as part of the CATALYST National Lottery Funded programme, helping small charities to digitise our services.

Under our digital partners’ expert guidance, we are developing our www.refugeehome.uk website, to make it easier to use, more accessible, and easier to access, particularly for new arrivals to Lancaster, or even Lancashire.

Working alongside other small charities, we have identified user needs, undertaken user journeys, identified some solutions, and are now in the process of testing our assumptions, as we don’t want to produce something that people won’t use.

We are exploring whether QR codes might make the website easier to access in the first place, but right now we are testing whether QR codes are something asylum seekers and refugees would actually use. So, we have created a 3 question survey using survey monkey, which our translators are translating into 5 languages, and which we are sharing on the Whatsapp groups, the main means of communicating with our users at the moment.

We are also testing our assumptions about another feature we want to build into the website, which is a function to book appointments with Global Link staff. To test whether people will use an online appointment booking system, we are creating a prototype using Calendly, which we will share on the whatsapp groups, again translated into 5 languages. Users will be invited to book an appointment next Tuesday to come and collect donated clothes, shoes and beddings from the YMCA.

In the meantime, we are producing new content for the website, and exploring ways of translating important sections of it into other languages. And we welcome content from other partners to make it even more useful to refugees and asylum seekers anywhere in the UK.