The NDCS launches new website

Parents of deaf children played a central role in designing the new site to ensure ease of navigation and to enable new audiences to grasp the varied work the charity undertakes.  

www.ndcs.org.uk features dedicated information for families, professionals, fundraisers and campaigners. The interactive site encourages dialogue with users, retaining its successful Parent Place discussion forum, as well as allowing users to post comments to pages across the site.

The new fundraising area has been developed to engage and communicate with supporters, describing the various ways supporters can help the NDCS by donating, fundraising, and organising and participating in events.  The campaigns pages outline the main challenges deaf children and their families face and how families can be involved with the NDCS in tackling these issues.

The new site also features a search facility to help users access the great wealth of information quickly and easily, and links to an online glossary to ensure every user clearly understands the terminology of deafness.

The rapid growth in users to the charity’s previous website and the need for greater and more in-depth content led to the development of the new site. From December 2005 to December 2006 the number of unique users to the site more than doubled (56%) and between 20,000 and 30,000 unique users now visit the site every month.  

Tobin Aldrich, NDCS Fundraising and Communications Director explains:

"The new website will transform our relationship with parents and professionals alike.  We now have an online resource, designed by parents, which allows us to provide a wealth of information to multiple audiences, while engaging in constant dialogue with our users.

"Following the successful implementation of newborn hearing screening programme last year, more babies than ever before are now being identified as deaf on the day they are born, so the demand for immediate accurate and impartial information has never been greater.

"The role of online communications in providing information, generating funds and mobilising grass roots supporters to campaign is now at the heart of any modern communications strategy. We see this new and evolving website as central to achieving our vision of a world without barriers for every deaf child”.

The National Deaf Children’s Society (NDCS) is the only UK charity solely dedicated to the support of deaf children and young people, their families, and professionals working with them.