Gig Buddies
The idea behind Gig Buddies is to enable people with learning disabilities and/or autism to access a fun and active social life, be part of their local community and create social relationships with other people with the same interests.
The project’s goal is to make volunteering easier. This is through matching people up with a volunteer who commits to at least one gig per month.
The Story
We have worked with the charity Stay Up Late for about a decade helping them with a number of design and development projects. I was lucky enough to be involved with the Gig Buddies project since its inception and was able to work with Stay Up Late on this ever since.
We have taken this project on as a full service taking the website from idea to design and full development. We did this by taking the Stay Up Late team through a fully facilitated design workshop where we looked at the needs of the organisation alongside the needs of the users of the service in order to offer the most useful content on the website. We then went through a full design and development programme utilising user personas, sitemaps, wireframing, high fidelity design and WordPress bespoke theme development.
Martin Gordon has helped us over the years at Stay Up Late and on the Gig Buddies campaign to align the work we are doing and the presentation of it online with our needs. His workshops allow us all to get creative and collaborate well on getting the most ideas out into the room.
The Results
We are now onto the third iteration of this particular site and the iterations have helped us to customise the design of the site and the content to help Gig Buddies become a successful project. Gig Buddies is now active across the UK from the South Coast up to Scotland and from Wales to East Anglia. It has also gone transnational and the project is now active in Sydney, Australia too.
