Website Development for The Royal Hospital Chelsea

The Royal Hospital Chelsea (RHC) provides a permanent home to 300 Chelsea Pensioners (retired Army veterans) within a 66 acre heritage site.

The RHC is a registered charity with 56% of our annual expenditure raised from commercial activities and fundraising.

We rent out spaces for events and functions, offer guided group tours of the Hospital and grounds, operate three membership schemes, support the full range of fundraising disciplines and encourage retired veterans to spend their later years at the RHC.

Due to an ambitious shift in organisational scope, we now require a new website that can support different departments within the organisation to achieve their marketing objectives.

Our key purpose remains to provide a home for the Chelsea Pensioners but we are now embarking on a programme of Veterans' Outreach, firstly in London and then expanding across the nation, as well as a new Visitor Centre at the Soane Stable Block (SSB), hoping to attract circa 40k visitors a year, to learn about our rich heritage (as well as casual visitors to a new café for secondary spend).

We have traditionally only ever supported 300 Chelsea Pensioners and have never opened our site as a heritage attraction before, so these new business ventures mark a sizable shift from our core operations.

Our key communications will create greater awareness of positive outcomes and the work of the RHC, a better understanding of the role of the older veteran in modern Britain, cement the ambassadorial role of the Chelsea Pensioners and encourage people to use our services, whether that be visit us, book a venue, become a beneficiary or donate.

Our current website is not fit for purpose, to work effectively for our current and new workflows and we require a new site that can increase our current commercial activities, have a better user experience and have the functionality needed for our business to grow.

In response to our increased operational scope the communications team have produced a new strategy that incorporates a new website, new marketing resource and new KPIs to ensure our business needs are met, particularly in the digital arena where currently we are stagnant.

Both Veterans' Outreach and the Visitor Centre are substantive new ventures for the RHC and as such need the digital infrastructure to support their success.

We want to create a website that is optimised for SEO, has a great user experience, is accessible, and has solutions to make the lives of our staff easier behind the scenes with fluid integration with our in-house systems.