Flowers from the Farm
Supporting locally grown, sustainable British flower farmers
The challenge
Flowers from the Farm is a not for profit membership association run by volunteer members who are also flower farmers.
They encourage more people to grow and sell cut flowers in the UK and provide practical business information to their members.
Their website is a key platform for promoting where to find British flower farmers, educating on the benefits of growing and buying locally grown British cut flowers and recruiting members.
The challenge was to design a seamless experience for members of the public to find and contact flower growers in this network. We also needed to provide a resource hub for the FftF members to share both their passion for what they do and business experience with the community. FftF volunteers are time poor, flower growers and business owners, it was essential that the new site decreased their membership administration load.
The approach
To ensure we fully understood the organisation, its members and the key messages they wanted to convey to the British public, we developed user personas and needs through a collaborative process. This included a remote workshop in which we discovered that the effortless beauty of British flowers arises from a strong network of devoted professionals.
We added ‘Member Stories’ to the new site, giving FftF members a platform to explain what they do and giving others the confidence to do the same. The aim of this was to encourage new members to sign up.
We wanted to emphasise the value of British seasonal, scented, garden-style blooms that are sustainably grown and so we dedicated a whole section of the new site to ‘Inspiration,’ using the stunning library of image content that FftF had collated from its members.
Importantly, we built a robust ‘Find Flowers’ members directory which allows members of the public to search for local flower growers and contact them directly to buy British cut flowers.
It was crucial that we developed a user friendly member sign up process and better management system for membership administration. We automated processes such as syncing new membership emails with regional welcome emails via MailChimp, saving lots of time for FftF volunteers.
The results
The new website is easy to maintain for FftF volunteers. Built using a flexible modular approach on WordPress and the MemberPress plugin, it is easy to keep it’s seasonal content updated and process new member sign ups.
The site is engaging and sells the beauty of British flowers so that the growers almost no longer need to!
The newly developed members area has proven to be intuitive for members to manage their profiles. Members have reported an increase in business through referrals from the Find Flowers directory.
‘’Pixeled Eggs took on our detailed scope and the fabulous website they’ve delivered showcases everything we wanted about the beauty and sustainability of British flowers. They worked really hard to understand how the site could meet our complex membership needs and the different objectives of site visitors (FFTF members, press, B2B customers and the general public). They’ve supported us brilliantly to bring it to life and worked hard to find technical solutions to meet our needs. For non-tech volunteers like us, the WordPress interface provides flexible and powerful design tools through which we can develop and edit our content going forward – we love it!’’
Carole Patilla, Flowers from the Farm Co-Chair
