Case studies
After a dementia diagnosis nobody hands you a map: the support exists, spread across dozens of places, and you find each piece by accident at the point you have least time to look. DementiaNet was built to fix that, starting with research rather than a designer. A focus group and interviews in Teesside, then a YouGov survey of over 500 and 251 more responses, decided what to build. In its first year the site took 5,743 sessions from 3,659 people, with organic search the largest channel and email open rates between 50 and 80%.
Ask around a couple of years ago and carers and families told you the same thing. The diagnosis gets delivered, sometimes gently and sometimes not, and then you’re left to work out what happens next on your own. The support does exist. There are services, charities, benefits, local groups and legal steps like power of attorney that people don’t even know to ask about. It is spread across dozens of places, and you find each piece by accident, usually at the exact point you’ve got the least time and energy to go looking.
The instinct, when a gap like this is obvious, is to build a website straight away. It’s the wrong instinct, and it’s how a lot of charity money gets wasted. You end up with a nicely designed site that duplicates the fragmented mess already out there, just with a better logo on top. Before committing to anything, we needed to know what people were actually struggling with, not what we assumed they were struggling with.
That instinct to build first and think later is exactly what the 12 questions every charity should ask before spending on digital are meant to catch.
So the first phase wasn’t design. It was listening.
We began close to home with qualitative work: a run of semi-structured telephone interviews and a 60-minute focus group. Telephone rather than online because the audience skews older and the carers are time-poor, and semi-structured because the useful stuff tends to come out in the tangents, not the set questions.
We dug into where the current services were strong and where they fell down, how people thought about dementia (there’s a stubborn assumption it’s only an elderly issue, when early onset is very real), what stopped the various organisations working together, and the biggest day-to-day challenges for people with dementia and the people caring for them.
A few things came back loud and clear. Support has to fit the individual, because no two cases look the same. Social connection, workplace support, transport and mental health care all needed work. Carers felt isolated and overwhelmed, often more so than the people they were caring for. And the single thing missing above everything else was one reliable reference point for the period straight after diagnosis, when people are at their most lost.
That’s a strong signal, but a focus group is a small sample. Before building anything on the back of it, we checked whether it held nationally. A YouGov survey in April 2024 put the questions to more than 500 people, and a second piece in July 2024 added another 251 responses. Both said the same: information is fragmented, and there’s real demand for structured planning tools and clear pathways rather than yet another list of links.
The research didn’t just confirm the idea was worth doing. It told us what to build. The two features that became the heart of the site, a planning tool and a local “in my area” directory, came directly out of what people said they were missing. We didn’t dream them up in a workshop.
From the research we built four personas: someone living with dementia, someone who suspects they have it but hasn’t been diagnosed, a family member caring for a relative, and a professional carer. That last distinction matters more than it looks. Someone quietly worried they’re becoming forgetful needs a completely different tone and journey from a professional carer looking up a specific benefit.
Personas get dismissed as a marketing exercise, but they do a real job here. They stop you building for an “average user” who doesn’t exist. Every design and content decision got tested against those four: would this make sense to them, in the state they’re likely to be in when they land on it?
Accessibility on a site like this isn’t a box to tick at the end. It’s the product. Your users are older, often stressed, sometimes living with cognitive decline themselves, and frequently reading on a phone in a hospital corridor. If they can’t use it easily, nothing else you did matters.
So the site was built to WCAG 2.1 AA, with a high-contrast colour palette we tested against the standards rather than eyeballing and hoping. Navigation was kept deliberately clear and the pages stripped of the usual clutter and distractions.
The build itself ran on a proper footing. A three-month discovery phase before we even chose a supplier, then Identify Digital selected to build it, with the site delivered over about seven months. For content we brought in three freelance journalists rather than marketers, and tailored what they wrote to each persona. Journalists because they write for humans and hit deadlines; the last thing this audience needed was another wall of policy language.
Here’s the mistake that kills good charity websites. You spend months building something genuinely useful, you launch it, and then it sits there in silence because nobody knows it exists. A brilliant site with no audience helps no one.
To avoid that we set up a twelve-month partnership with DementiaHelpUK magazine before launch. It meant that from day one the site had an established social following and a real email list behind it, instead of starting from a standing stop. It went live in November 2024.
Numbers on a project like this need reading properly, not just quoting. Here’s the honest picture from launch to the end of 2025.
The site had 5,743 sessions from 3,659 people, the large majority of them new. More telling than the totals is where they came from. Organic search brought 2,029 sessions, just ahead of direct at 1,918, with referral traffic at 897, email at 558 and social at 349. Organic being the biggest channel is the one I’m most pleased about. It means people are finding the site when they search for help, which for a “what do I do next” service is exactly the moment you want to be there. That kind of visibility takes time to build, and it’s now the engine.
The email list grew from 286 subscribers at launch to 547 by the end of 2025, close to a doubling. The open rates are the standout: routinely between 50 and 80%, and 87% in one month, against a charity sector norm nearer 25%. That’s not a fluke of clever subject lines. It’s what happens when a list is small, warm and made up of people who genuinely need what you’re sending. I’d take that engagement over a list ten times the size that nobody opens.
On the tools themselves, the planning tool has had 154 signups and there were 456 form starts across the period, comfortably ahead of the modest target we set at the outset. And the audience is increasingly mobile, with phone usage climbing past 60% of sessions in some of the later months, which fits a user who’s out and about or sitting in a waiting room rather than at a desk.
The bit most case studies leave out: it’s lumpy. Traffic goes quiet over the summer and spikes when a partner pushes something out, as it did in November 2025 when referral traffic jumped to over 500 in a single month. That unevenness is completely normal for a charity site, and it’s the whole reason the partnership and the search visibility matter. They keep the thing ticking over between the busier campaign moments.
The research wasn’t the slow, boring bit before the real work. It was the reason the real work landed. If we’d gone straight to a designer we’d have guessed at what people needed and, on the evidence, guessed wrong; the two most-used parts of the site are the two features that came out of asking. Do the homework and you’re not gambling on the build.
If you’re a charity weighing up something similar, the pattern is worth stealing. Research before you design, even when it feels like a delay. Build for real people, not an average one. Treat accessibility as the product, not the polish. Line up an audience before you launch rather than after. And give search time, because the traffic that’s now DementiaNet’s biggest source took a year of patience to arrive.
Work of this shape is digital strategy. The research phase behind it is in DementiaNet: bridging the gaps in dementia support.
Because guessing is what wastes the money. The two most-used parts of the site, the planning tool and the local directory, came directly out of what people said they were missing. Neither was dreamed up in a workshop, and on the evidence a straight-to-design project would have guessed wrong.
They are, and they are what a small warm list looks like: routinely between 50 and 80%, and 87% in one month, against a charity sector norm nearer 25%. The list is 547 people who genuinely need what is being sent. I would take that over a list ten times the size that nobody opens.
Because for a service answering "what do I do next", search is the moment you want to be there. Organic brought 2,029 sessions in the first year, just ahead of direct, and that visibility took a year of patience to build. It is now what keeps the site ticking over between campaign moments.
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