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Renewal of the Mannerheim League for Child Welfare’s online newsletter services

The Mannerheim League for Child Welfare promotes the wellbeing of children, young people, and families by providing support and activities. Redandblue served as a partner in the renewal of MLL’s online letter services, which was carried out during spring and summer 2024.

The Mannerheim League for Child Welfare (MLL) is one of Finland’s largest and best-known civic organizations. MLL is an active player at local, regional, and national levels. MLL’s helplines and digital services provide several nationwide support services for children, young people, and adults alike. These services offer anonymous, confidential, and free support through multiple channels of contact.

Starting points and objectives

MLL’s Helplines and Digital Services play a significant societal role as anonymous support services for children, young people, and parents. The online letter services are one of the key support channels within MLL’s low-threshold support services for different target groups. Each year, the online letter services handle around 2,000 contacts. The responses are provided by approximately 300 trained MLL volunteers annually.

The online letter services were originally launched in the early 2000s, and their platform had become technically outdated. Over the years, the number of letter services had also increased, and maintaining the old solution had become burdensome, as each service was maintained separately.

The goal was to build a new, corresponding service that would better meet today’s needs in terms of both platform and user interface. The old service design was also outdated, so the renewal aimed to modernize both the appearance and the service logic. In the new solution, as much synergy as possible was sought between the different services to make their maintenance and updates more cost-effective and smooth.

MLL was looking for a partner for the implementation, with collaboration continuing after the build phase in the form of maintenance, small-scale development, and further enhancements.

Refinement of the concept and specification

The definition of the core functionalities of the online letter services was based both on the features of the old services and on the experience MLL had gained over the years about which functions were most important to improve from the perspectives of both letter writers and responders.

The technical foundations and functionalities were refined through workshop collaboration. In these workshops, the different needs of the target groups, as well as their overlaps and differences, were defined. The specification work was carried out in close cooperation between redandblue and MLL experts.

One of the service’s most important cornerstones is anonymity, so the design of security-related solutions was carefully considered already in the specification phase. For example, the permission models for different user groups and secure login to the service were precisely defined during this stage.

Design

The new services’ look and feel follow MLL’s brand. The design particularly emphasized the most important functions for different user groups. In planning the services, the diverse needs of end users, as well as MLL’s staff and volunteers, were taken into account. The design focused on making the service as intuitive and user-friendly as possible for every target group. In addition to the front-end views, several custom features and views were created for the content management interface to make the daily work of MLL’s staff and volunteers easier in operating the services. The design also took into consideration the steadily increasing use of mobile devices.

  • Anna Weckström

    Managing Specialist

Working with the Redandblue team was easy from the very beginning, and we felt that our project was meaningful to them as well. What we especially appreciated during the project was that Redandblue always strived to find the best possible solutions and communicated the different options to us openly and clearly.

  • Anna Weckström

    Managing Specialist

Solution description

All four services were to be brought under one roof, so WordPress Multisite was chosen as the platform. This solution allows the different services to be managed centrally from one place. The service uses custom content types, and the WordPress admin panel was equipped with several options for filtering and managing content, making maintenance smoother and easier.

In the solution, each target group was given its own views and user journeys, with access rights restricted according to the group. The dynamic user interface was implemented as a Vue application.

Particular attention was paid to security and data anonymization. End user account data is anonymous, and no personal information, such as email addresses, is stored in the database. Letters written by users are stored in encrypted form. For MLL staff and volunteers, an integration was implemented to enable secure AD login.

The service was also equipped with several additional features, such as automatic deactivation of user accounts after a certain period, easily managed tools to limit the maximum number of contacts, and handling of exceptional notifications.

Contact us

Reeta Laamo

Managing Director, Co-Founder

Reeta is one of redandblue's founders and a Senior Designer, who is an expert in user-centred design and accessibility.

Phone: +358 44 362 7714