Andy Dennis: Charity Fundraiser

What the brief was

The site started life as a blog, something for Andy to update sponsors, friends and colleagues back in Harrogate while he walked from Amsterdam to Barcelona. A previous agency had chosen WordPress for one practical reason: Andy needed to update it from a phone, since there was no room in his pack for a laptop.

By the time I took it over, that agency had long since shut down. Andy needed someone to keep the site running and make it quicker and simpler to use, without losing the one thing that actually mattered: people could still find him and see what he was doing.

What I did

I worked on this alone, fitting the build around Andy's own hectic schedule rather than the other way round. He was either mid-challenge or about to be, so there was never a quiet, ideal moment to do this properly. You take the time when it is offered.

The website's job has always been simple to describe and harder to deliver: be findable. Andy is a charity fundraiser. The people who matter, past sponsors, colleagues, people who heard him give a talk, need to be able to find him again months or years later and see that the work is still going. Think of the site as one big business card, except people search for it from all over the world rather than pulling it out of a wallet.

I gave Andy a quicker system to run than the one he had, so updating it would not become one more thing competing for his time. The basics matter more than anything fancy here: keep the software updated, keep blogging, keep putting fresh content up, keep the donations coming in for MSF.

The site also gives space to Ebola Behind the Mask, the book Andy wrote with Anna Simon about their time at an Ebola treatment centre in Sierra Leone. It is a first hand account, built from their own diary and blog entries at the time, and it deserves more than a single buried link.

That is Andy's own verdict, not mine. The site is still running, and so is Andy. Since the original walk from Amsterdam to Barcelona, he has cycled across America and ridden from Amsterdam to Gibraltar, all for MSF, all self funded so that every pound donated goes straight to the charity. He is, by any honest description, a force of nature, and it has been good to watch him do his thing.

What I want you to take away

If your agency has a client too busy living the story to manage a website on top of it, that is exactly the kind of long-term, low-maintenance build I take on for white label work too.