Burnet News Club

About the Burnet News Club

The Burnet News Club is a charity that’s part of the Economist foundation. Their mission is to enable young people to understand and thoughtfully influence social, political, and economic issues shaping society and affecting lives.

The Brief

The charity needed a new responsive website that allowed for the expansion and development of the Burnet News Club programme over the next five years (and beyond), both in the UK and potentially internationally.

They felt they weren’t interacting with their target audience, and in an attempt to bridge this gap, decided to create more content relating to current affairs. The second challenge was laying out this content and creating a website that students would like to read and interact with, which is where my expertise came in.

Furthermore, creating a platform for students to post content was another important aspect of the project. They had multiple types of users and wanted varying accounts types based on what was handled and the type of work they did.

My approach

I had to design a website that makes finding content easier for students, thereby allowing them to partake in rich discussions. I also had to work on allowing students to post their content on the blog, which wasn’t difficult, but the differences in the styles of content made it a little challenging, especially for the sake of having consistency across the website. To increase engagement, the platform created a system of rewarding strong content and profiles that stood out, thereby forcing users to increase the frequency of their posts.

I had to create a separate section, with a ton of additional functionality for the admins of the site, which was another element of the project needing brainstorming. On the flipside, a lot of the predictable functions were automated. This section was added with the ability to supervise data collection, reporting, and analytics to let the client understand what was and wasn’t working.