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Claire House is a Wirral-based children’s hospice which helps seriously and terminally ill children live life to the full by creating wonderful experiences and bringing back a sense of normality to family life, offering specialist nursing care and emotional support to families in the toughest of circumstances.

What the client wanted
Claire House’s website was being completely overhauled and they needed new content. As a hospice which provides care for children with terminal and life-changing illnesses, it was very important that the content was written extremely sensitively, as the audience was likely to be the parents and family of those children. There were also sections which needed to be written very differently, as they were being aimed at larger corporations and their financial contributions which Claire House relies upon.

The content needed to be caring and gentle in some sections and business-like in others, but always clear, understandable and well written.

What we did
Working with the sitemap that had been drawn up and decided  with the web design company, I set about filling each section. In some cases – such as the potted biographies of some of the trustees – the raw material was already there from the earlier incarnation of the website, but needed to be re-crafted in the Claire House “voice” to fit the new site. In many others, I needed to resource the content as well as write it, which involved telephone, email and face-to-face interviews with many Claire House staff and volunteers, ranging from CEO David Pastor to shop manager Karen Carr.

The copy, which also had to fit a very specific word limit, was delivered over an allotted time period to the charity’s Head of Communications Hannah Shannon before the new site could go live, which it duly did at the end of 2016.

End result
Much of the work I did for Claire House can be seen on their website, although I am particularly proud of my piece about Claire Cain, the brave little girl whose death in 1989 directly led to the formation of Claire House. That can be read here.

Testimonial
Working with Andrew is great. His broad range of skills mean that he can help out on a number of marketing tasks and ensure that a small organisation like ours is able to call in extra support and expertise when needed.

Hannah Shannon, Head of Communications, Claire House