The Community of St. Anselm

Who are The Community of St. Anselm?

The Community of St. Anselm is a non-profit organisation offering one-year monastic experiences for young people aged 20 to 35 years. It was started by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, to give young people the experience of prayer, service and living as part of a spiritual community.

The Community had already been working with a branding agency and graphic designer on developing a fun and engaging brand that would show their target audience the benefits they would enjoy.

We were hired to use our technical expertise to interpret that brand through a website.

We have created a contemporary website for the Community which clearly shows the different pathways members can take. From the home page, interested visitors can sign up for a newsletter, access further information or apply for their monastic place.

Building Connections

St Anselm had some strong design concepts but needed an experienced agency that could collaborate with their wider team to interpret those designs on a technical level.

They were also reassured by our project management capabilities which would ensure the website would be ready to go live when they needed it to.

A Shared Vision

The success of this project depended on us striking a fine balance between aesthetics, function, user experience and execution. It would have been possible to have added more bells and whistles but at the expense of technical simplicity.

Adding too many features would have risked bloating the code leading to slower page load times and potential confusion for potential Community members.

This was a collaborative project and we needed to pass concepts and designs back and forth between existing graphic designers and branding specialists to ensure the client was getting the vision and the value they were looking for.

We often acted as an arbitrator in this process, suggesting pragmatic ways in which the client could achieve their objectives while remaining true to their brand identity.

As part of the project, we had to streamline their content and clearly separate out the two pathways applicants could take: immersive or integrative.

It was essential that potential members could easily find where to apply for their place without being put off or distracted by other content.

At the same time, we made sure that the visitor would be engaged by the content and could easily access community stories and FAQs.

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