The Repair Campaign

This was the foundational call, and it wasn't obvious. A custom React or Next.js build would have been faster and more flexible on paper. But it would have made the client dependent on us for every article, every page update, every embed.

WordPress with Elementor gave the team full editorial control. They can publish breaking news, edit layouts, add sections, and update content on their own timeline without a developer. We built it so they wouldn't need us day to day.

The reparations movement is rooted in history. One of the biggest barriers to engagement is that the topic can feel too complex, too distant, or too contested to touch. A well-structured timeline, from the transatlantic slave trade through to current CARICOM negotiations, addresses that directly.

We put the timeline on the homepage, not buried in a sub-page. Two versions: a horizontal scrolling layout for desktop that creates a sense of progression through time, and a vertically stacked layout for mobile. The goal was to make history feel navigable. A path through complexity, not a wall of text.

Most advocacy websites default to broadcast mode. They publish and hope people read. The Repair Campaign needed something more active. Every page has a conversion point: a newsletter signup, a petition CTA, a path to Get Involved.

The Sign in Solidarity petition was raised to a primary navigation action, not buried in a page. The newsletter signup appears above the fold and again at the bottom of the homepage. The Instagram feed on the homepage isn't decoration. It shows the movement is live and growing right now. These are friction-reduction choices. Make it as easy as possible for a visitor to take a step, any step, toward participation.

The site serves two audiences with very different expectations. A first-time visitor needs context: what is reparatory justice, why does it matter, what is the history? A returning community member wants the latest: which governments are moving, what was said at the last summit, what should they be sharing?

We structured the site for both. Get Informed and Learning Hub hold durable educational content designed to stay relevant regardless of the news cycle. In The News, Dive Deeper, and the newsletter serve the community's need for timely updates. The split also has an SEO benefit. The evergreen sections build long-term organic visibility around reparations search terms, while the news section keeps people coming back.

The reparations movement is highly active on social. Political speeches, breaking news reactions, community updates all hit Instagram first. Embedding the feed on the homepage means the site feels alive even between formal blog posts.

It also cuts content management overhead. A single Instagram post automatically surfaces on the website. No duplication of effort, no lag. For an organisation running lean, that kind of workflow efficiency adds up.

Raw analytics data is noise. A dashboard built around the questions an organisation actually asks is signal. We set up GA4 across the site and built custom reporting dashboards showing the numbers that mattered: traffic sources, most-read content, petition page conversions, and the geographic spread of their audience.

That last point proved strategically useful. Knowing that significant traffic was coming from the UK, Jamaica, and Caribbean diaspora communities in North America and Europe helped the team focus their outreach and understand where the movement was resonating. The dashboards were built to be readable by the comms team, not data analysts. Clear, labelled, updated automatically.

Reparatory justice is an increasingly searched topic. Major events like CARICOM negotiations, parliamentary debates, and international advocacy milestones drive real search volume. We structured the site to capture that: clean URL slugs, properly configured meta descriptions, schema markup, and content hubs built around the long-tail keyword clusters a first-time searcher would actually use.

Beyond the technical setup, we established a regular posting cadence: monthly news roundups, event-driven articles, and newsletter editions that create a continuous stream of fresh, indexed content. Each new article is another entry point for organic search. Over time this compounded. The site built authority in the reparations topic area and traffic grew during news cycles as it ranked for relevant terms. The SEO work and the community architecture reinforced each other. Organic visitors arrived, found value, and converted into subscribers.

In a content-heavy WordPress site with multiple contributors covering fast-moving news, duplicate content builds up fast. Similar articles, reposted news items, overlapping topic pages. For most organisations this goes unnoticed. For SEO it's a quiet tax: Google splits ranking authority across duplicate URLs rather than consolidating it, so every duplicated piece dilutes the equity the site has built.

We audited existing content, identified duplicates and near-duplicates, and resolved them through consolidation, canonical tags, and removal where content was genuinely redundant. We also put a lightweight editorial process in place to stop it recurring. Simple enough that the team could follow it without thinking too hard about it.

Email serves a different audience than social. The Repair Campaign's newsletter subscriber base skews toward more committed, older supporters: people who opted in explicitly and expect quality content. The design and experience of those emails matters.

We designed a branded email template system, header, body, feature blocks, footer, that matched the site's visual identity and held up across email clients. Beyond the template, we managed the ongoing send cycle: list management, subscriber segmentation, send scheduling, and performance tracking. Consistent, well-designed emails build trust over time in a way that sporadic generic ones don't. Every send reinforces that this organisation is serious and worth paying attention to.

This was the most technically involved piece of the engagement. The team found that switching between WordPress, where they wrote content, and their email platform, where they scheduled sends, was creating delays and errors. Content would be ready but emails would go out late. Drafts would get out of sync between platforms.

We built a custom WordPress plugin that moved the scheduling step directly into the WordPress admin. The workflow became: write the newsletter post, set a send date and time in the same editor panel, publish. The plugin handles the rest: queuing the send, pulling the content into the email template, and dispatching at the scheduled time. No platform switching, no copy-pasting, no sync issues.

Building this as a plugin rather than recommending a third-party tool was a considered choice. Third-party scheduling tools add another subscription, another login, and another point of failure. A native plugin lives inside the system the team already uses every day.