Hope for Justice: the global banner

Andrew greeted me with his trademark grin and somewhat bleary eyes. Though he was tired, I could tell that he was feeling good.

“Well," he said, confirming the feeling. "That went well.”

As it happened, Andrew's bleary eyes marked the conclusion of an important time period. He’d been working with Hope for Justice on a very special project for the past few months, you see, and had been up until six in the morning, throwing the switch to make it live (due to issues created by multiple time-zones, rather than due to us chaining him to his computer until it was done!).

On the the one hand, this was a redesign which required lots of technical expertise. First, we worked closely with Hope for Justice’s in-house design team to update the look and feel. Then we made the website responsive, bringing it in-line with user expectations. The idea here was to make the site equally beautiful and functional, regardless of the device it was being used on.

Once those important tasks were done, we completely overhauled the chosen content management system, which happened to be WordPress. This crucial step gave Hope for Justice the tools they needed to swiftly go forward. Now, their content team was in a much better position and could build beautiful, long-form pages like never before. (For interest, this involved the extensive use of custom fields.) Perhaps most importantly of all, they could do so independently, just as fast as their fingers could type.

But, the real core of the story in all this is that Hope for Justice is expanding dramatically to fight human trafficking and bring an end to modern slavery.

On Friday, they joined up with Abolition International and Transitions Global to become one organisation under the global Hope for Justice banner.

As a result, three incredible anti-slavery organisations have now become one.

Naturally, it goes without saying that most of us here at Fluent have been involved in this project in one way or another. Behind the scenes, Andrew and the rest of our team have been doing all sorts to get everything exactly where it needs to be. In the case of this particular project, that means things like redirecting old links, creating a special landing page for each of the organisations, and migrating dozens of email accounts.

Becoming an international organisation brings with it a number of other technical challenges, of course, and it all requires some careful attention. For example, payment processing gets rather complicated. How so? Well, we needed to allow for multiple accounts with providers for multiple currencies. To do this, we banged our heads together and came up with the idea of creating a custom WordPress plugin which integrates with Stripe. This is now up and running for all American transactions, and for British transactions – which will follow in a few weeks – we will use a slightly different tactic. Here, we'll use this plugin and integrate with GoCardless, another provider, for direct debit donations.

The most exciting part of any project had now arrived. By Friday, the new website was live and the world was ready for the big announcement.

We are honoured to have been able to work with Hope for Justice, and, with that, I’ll leave the last words to Andrew:

“Personally I think the biggest reward has been seeing how that technology leap has enabled the charity to raise funds in a more direct and seamless way. The fact that that enables them to set up more investigation teams and provide more aftercare is what makes the project so exciting.”