Introduction
My chosen non-profit organisation is LNK (Lives Not Knives), an organisation founded in 2007, based in London focusing on educating the youth between the ages of 9 and 21, steering them away from youth violence, gang culture and knife crime, whilst also supporting victims and their families that have been affected.
Their campaign initially picked up momentum and started to get recognized due to a ‘Lives Not Knives’ T-shirt. The donations raised from the LNK T-shirts went directly back into the organisation and the cause, by funding a celebration in a violent-free environment for the youth.
The mission statement and goals of LNK can be summarized into three words, which are to engage, educate and empower, which they use to create a greater impact on their local community. LNK takes various approaches to achieve their goals and reach out to the youth, visiting schools, offering mentorship, running programmes and workshops, visiting schools and other events.
Initial Design Ideas and Inspiration
Upon analyzing the Lives Not Knives website, I was able to come to a quick decision that there were changes to be made and innovative ideas implemented to further support their cause through the power of the web. I revisited my analysis of the Movember site earlier in the module which helped me to identify some key mistakes within the grid system and use of whitespace throughout the LNK website.
I also looked at the Leukemia UK website and got some inspiration about the composition, content, and use of colour. LNK uses a monochromatic colour scheme, with an orange accent colour used on very few elements, colour is a tool that could be used more effectively across the site to draw attention to specific imagery, information and buttons; such as clear CTA in the orange accent which would in turn help with donations and users reaching out. A more centralized web design grid should be applied to the LNK website, allowing a more fluid composition to be made using their already bold and contrasting typeface, creating a more consistent visual hierarchy across the site.
Due to the poor use of grids and composition across the website, all the content including the menu is aligned to the left leading to an excess white space. The space provided would be better suited for a modular grid, allowing the landing page and page headers to be spread across the full page and different pages to use modular content boxes to create an improved contrast and visual hierarchy.
Target Audience Analysis
LNK states that in their aim and mission, the main target audience is young people between the ages of 9 and 21, to steer them away from a dangerous path. Upon further research, the LNK cause should have a slightly different audience based on knife crime activity within London.
‘Analysis of Metropolitan Police crime data for 2016/17 shows that 75 per cent of victims of knife crime are male and often aged less than 25 years of age. Almost half of all victims of knife crime were from BAME backgrounds.’(Mayor of London, 2017, p.11)
Suggesting that moving forward, LNK should alter their target audience to under 25 and look at further improving their web presence to target young black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds. If this is implemented correctly by marketing web and physical materials to environments where these individuals would be they could see a higher success rate.
After the analysis of the proposed target audience and considering the successful T-shirt campaign that LNK ran in 2008, I created the idea of creating a campaign more suited to the target audience. This inspiration comes from a brand called ‘Boys Get Sad Too’, a clothing brand supporting men’s mental health awareness; they initially started with plain white type on black clothing to raise money and soon ventured out and grew by creating unique designs tailored to a larger audience. This is a strategy that LNK could adopt to spread their message and awareness of their cause, by harnessing the interest of their target audience and creating a t-shirt campaign that speaks to young men in their community.
Objectives for the Multi-Channel Marketing Strategy
LNK has a lot of opportunities to improve outreach by scaling its marketing across a variety of mediums; a newsletter which would be available to sign up for via the LNK site would be an effective way to keep users updated with current workshops, stories, articles and events taking place within the local community.
The LNK social media platforms have a lot of room for improvement; Instagram is a platform mainly used to share photos which is not being done in this case, instead relies heavily on black-on-white text imagery. This causes the current feed, which is shown below, to be not very engaging. Another potential change for the LNK Instagram profile is the organization’s handle. Instagram chooses to show their account handles in full lowercase, creating the @LNKcharity handle to be mistaken for the word ‘ink’ which could cause confusion to the user and make the brand more difficult to find.
LNK already has a gallery of video content across their current social media platforms, the next step to improve this would be to use TikTok as an additional marketing channel due to the target audience age range matching a large demographic of TikTok users ‘a billion monthly active users, with the majority of them falling in the 16–24 age group.’
All social media marketing strategies can be brought together by creating a coherent theme across all social media platforms and cross-posting so that different platform followers get updated with the latest news at the same time.
The New Web Presence.
There are several key features that will be included with the new web presence such as an improved website consisting of a restructured grid, use of colour and white space to create a balanced site for an improved user experience; this will go hand in hand in improving how responsive the site is displayed on other devices.
Another feature to add to the site is a newsletter pop-up box overlay on the landing page, with a CTA to encourage users to engage and sign up for email updates for upcoming events and newsletters which in turn should help the organisation maximise their reach.
References
UX Design Institute, 2024. How to Use Grids in Web Design. Available at: https://www.uxdesigninstitute.com/blog/how-to-use-grids-in-web-design/ [Accessed 01 November 2024].
Lives Not Knives, 2024. Lives Not Knives. Available at: https://www.livesnotknives.org/ [Accessed 04 November 2024].
Mayor of London, 2017. Knife Crime Strategy. Available at: https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/mopac_knife_crime_strategy_june_2017.pdf [Accessed 04 November 2024].
Leukaemia UK, 2024. Available at: https://www.leukaemiauk.org.uk/ [Accessed 02 November 2024].
Nerds Collective, 2023. The Role of TikTok in Youth Marketing: Tips for Success. Available at: https://medium.com/@nerdscollectiveagency/the-role-of-tiktok-in-youth-marketing-tips-for-success-ff0896fb4709[Accessed 02 November 2024].
Movember UK, 2024. Available at: https://uk.movember.com/ [Accessed 02 November 2024].
Urban Outfitters UK. Available at: https://www.urbanoutfitters.com [Accessed 05 November 2024]
Lives Not Knives. Instagram. Available at: https://www.instagram.com/lnkcharity/[Accessed 28 October 2024]
Lives Not Knives. X. Available at: https://x.com/LNKcharity[Accessed 28 October 2024]
