How we helped a West Sussex charity bring clarity and purpose to its online presence — making it easier for the young people and referrers who need them most to find their way in.
Some organisations do extraordinary work that very few people know about. The Camelia Botnar Foundation has been quietly changing young lives since 1979, offering 16 to 21-year-olds from difficult and disadvantaged backgrounds a genuine fresh start — residential training, real trade qualifications, accommodation, and the structure and support many of them have never had before. Set on a 550-acre estate near Horsham in West Sussex, it is one of the most remarkable charitable programmes in the country. What it lacked was a website that did justice to any of that.
The Foundation came to Three Girls Media through a recommendation from an existing client — which, as is often the case, is the best kind of introduction. Clayton and the team knew that the website needed to work harder. It had to communicate the scale and warmth of what the Foundation offers, and it had to make it easy for the two very different audiences who use it — referral organisations such as social workers, probation officers, and local authorities on one side, and prospective trainees and their families on the other — to find what they needed and take the next step.
The brief was focused on two things: a clearer, more compelling online presence that reflected the genuine quality of the programme, and a website that made applying for a place or booking a tour as straightforward as possible. If the website was getting in the way of young people accessing the Foundation, every friction point in the journey was one too many.
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We started with the web design, and the first task was to understand how the Foundation actually works — the programme structure, the eight trade departments, the facilities, the application and referral process, and the day-to-day life on the estate. A charity like this can’t be reduced to a brochure. The website needed to explain something genuinely complex, and do so in a way that felt warm and human rather than institutional.
We restructured the site around the two core audiences. For referral organisations — the professionals who place young people into the programme – we created a clear referrals pathway with all the information needed to understand eligibility and make a formal application. For prospective trainees and their families, we made the programme itself the centrepiece: what a typical day looks like, what trades are available, what the accommodation and facilities are like, and what life at the Foundation actually involves. The Book a Tour page was given proper prominence, because for many families, visiting the estate in person is what turns interest into an application.
Across the site, we gave each of the eight trade departments – carpentry, welding and blacksmithing, mechanics, catering, building maintenance, estate maintenance, painting and decorating, and the garden centre – its own dedicated page. Showcasing the breadth of what the Foundation offers matters: a young person who doesn’t see themselves in one trade might find their vocation in another, and the website needed to open as many of those doors as possible.
Alongside the web design, we worked on SEO to improve the Foundation’s visibility for the searches that matter most — referral organisations and local authorities looking for residential training programmes, and young people searching for an alternative route into skilled work. We also designed a newsletter template for the Foundation to use in their regular communications, giving updates on trainee progress, estate news, and programme developments a consistent, professional look that reflects the care and quality of everything else the Foundation does.
The Camelia Botnar Foundation now has a website that does the organisation justice — one that communicates the warmth, ambition, and genuine impact of the programme from the moment someone arrives on the homepage. For referral professionals, the pathway to making a referral is clear and well-structured. For prospective trainees and their families, the programme feels real and accessible, and booking a tour or making an enquiry is straightforward.
That clarity matters more than it might in a commercial setting. For a young person already dealing with uncertainty, a confusing or off-putting website can be enough to put them off. Removing that friction — giving the website the same care and thoughtfulness that the Foundation gives to its trainees — was what the project was always really about.
It is the kind of work we find genuinely meaningful, and an ongoing relationship we are proud of. Clayton and the team are deeply committed to what they do, and our job is to make sure the people who most need to find the Foundation can do so easily.
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