Using web technology to help Hope for Justice fight modern slavery
Hope for Justice began as a small group of friends determined to do something about modern day slavery. It has grown into an international NGO freeing people from human trafficking and slavery.
Fluent has been privileged to support Hope for Justice as it has grown, providing some of the key technology breakthroughs to enable the work to take place.
Back in 2008, the movement was just beginning, and we set up the third-party systems that allowed them to raise awareness and funds without having their money, time and energy eaten up. As the charity became established, it focused more on the hands-on effort of investigating trafficking and rescuing and rehabilitating victims. We found the best systems for working with legal teams and the police. The key was to build and knit together flexible systems that could evolve as the organisation grew.
Four years later, with the message growing ever louder, a big website redesign was necessary. Fluent implemented the new designs and gave Hope for Justice the control they needed to add more content to the site themselves. At the same time, we helped to coordinate mailouts to their growing base of supporters.
One of the highlights of Hope for Justice’s campaign – and of Fluent’s work for it – was the 2013 Zoe Challenge bike ride from Latvia to the UK. It was supported by a number of celebrities, including Twitter A-lister Stephen Fry. We built a new website to promote the challenge and to deal with the sheer volume of traffic that daytime TV chat shows – not to mention a celebrity tweet – can bring.
In 2014 the organisation took a giant leap forward by joining up with Abolition International and Transitions Global. Again, they asked for Fluent’s support to update designs, content and make their website fully responsive. We also overhauled the CMS so that staff could create their own beautiful long-form pages. We took care of new landing pages, link redirects and email accounts migration
Integrating payment processing
More important still was the technical challenge of taking international payments. There is no one-size-fits-all payment solution for different countries, so we have had to build custom methods to take money as frictionlessly as possible in Europe and the USA. It’s not just about finding the right technology, but designing a user experience which considers cultural expectations, localised language and financial compliance.
The biggest reward of partnering with an NGO like Hope for Justice is seeing how enabling them to raise funds seamlessly has directly impacted the scale and scope of their work. They now have more investigation teams and more aftercare for victims than ever. May they continue to grow.
“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.”
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