Joe Simmons
Case Study | We Can Move
Creating a social movement to change a county’s health
Introduction
Not just a campaign. A movement.
‘We can move’ is a Gloucestershire organisation with a bigger goal than getting individuals healthy: it wants to build a self-sustaining social movement, where people get active and bring others with them. My job was to turn that ambition into a website and booking platform that could carry it.
The challenge
Every community moves differently.
The focus of the movement is the people who need it most: the least active, most at-risk and most disadvantaged.
However, these communities could hardly be more different: older adults, disabled people, young people, workplaces and health professionals. Each behaves differently, responds to different messaging, and has different events.
Nothing like it had been attempted, so there was no model to follow. I was tasked with understanding every group and building a website that could help them all.
The solution
The full package: speed, power, design and flexibility.
Seven interviews with department heads, social-movement consultants and senior leadership pointed to one need above all: each division had to reach its own community in its own way.
So I designed a custom CMS on a flexible database, working closely with the developer to build it. The team could spin up new pages from reusable components and respond to their communities as things changed. I also created a base system of components and styles that scaled across use cases, keeping every page simple, consistent and easy to run.
A closer look
More than a website: a custom event booking system.
Events are how the movement actually happens, so booking had to be effortless. ‘We can move’ was renting Eventbrite and wanted to own the experience end to end. I designed a custom event booking system that kept people on-site from browsing to confirmation, streamlined sign-up, and removed the third-party dependency, giving the team a foundation they could extend with their own features later.
Results
Technically powerful, socially transformative.
It had to be two things at once: a serious technical build, and something that could genuinely change a county. It became both.
‘We can move’ now runs the whole platform itself, so every division reaches its audience, publishes its own pages, and takes bookings without anyone leaving the site. Moving off Eventbrite cut its third-party costs and put a whole county’s activity in one place. And a first-of-its-kind social movement now has the momentum, and the platform, to keep spreading person to person, well beyond its first year.
