Why change the website, what's new and what's next?
Published on: 22/01/2019
IRC's new website better reflects our Theory of Change - what we think needs to happen in water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH). It provides a clearer explanation of what we're doing and a community of practice with associated resources to support what we all need to do to achieve our shared WASH goals.
People tend to know us as a think tank, but we call ourselves a think and do tank for a reason. We're implementing change and have commited to achieving SDG 6 in our partner districts. 'Systems thinking' - and doing - is at the centre of our mission to achieve safe water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) service delivery for all. So we took a critical look at our own systems, which resulted in a major revamp of our website and ongoing process of improving our communications.
Our main goal? Making it easier to navigate through our content, inspire people to invest in and apply a systems approach to WASH and be part of a community that already promotes this approach.
Firstly, we are presenting content on the new website in a clearer manner helping people to get what they need more effectively.
For visitors new to IRC, who are casual and interested, we aim to answer simple questions on the Home and About Us pages, such as What is IRC? What does it do? Where does IRC work? And it also provides the opportunity for supporters of our work to donate.
For people who are intrigued and would like to find out more, the Our Impact page is a way to show more detail about our programmes in an engaging way. For instance, in Ghana we're working in Asutifi North district where from the population of 62,816, only 50% have access to safe water and only 15.6% to safe sanitation. Now the Ghana page explains what IRC is doing to improve WASH in the district.
There is also an entire section called WASH Systems on the new website, which is designed for people who would like to find out more about the building blocks of a systems approach.
For the WASH experts: For those who work in the WASH sector or who want to dive deeper into our content, views and initiatives, there is the For Experts section. For those familiar with the IRC site it will be reassuringly familiar – with news, events, blogs, resources, toolkits, podcasts and much more including our unashamed WASH-nerd reflections.
Conversations around IRC's 50th anniversary this year (check out our IRC 50 interview series) have repeatedly brought the importance of IRC as a repository of knowledge to the foreground. This is something we're proud of and want to build on.
This is just the start. We will continue to improve our communication channels and in particular our website. We hope you find the changes useful. Happy to hear what you think!
