Lisa Bedlow of Gabriels Education, on getting their mission out from behind a broken booking process.
Gabriels Education is a UK community interest company. Their vehicle is outdoor learning; their mission is children's mental health and wellbeing. They run programmes that get children learning outdoors, they increasingly train teachers to carry that wellbeing work back into the classroom, and they support the families around them. The people who book them are not casual buyers. They are school leaders and local council teams making considered decisions about the children in their care.
That makes this a B2B story wearing a friendly face. Every workshop booked is another school or council reached, and another group of children supported. Because Gabriels is a charity with a mission we believe in, we committed significant time and resources beyond the usual scope to help them get there.
The challenge
Their programmes were excellent. The way people booked them was not. Registrations ran through Facebook messages, emails and manual bank transfers, with event details scattered across social media and no way to book in one place. Serious enquiries dropped out at the friction. In search, they were effectively invisible for the terms schools and parents actually typed. And the admin of running it all by hand was eating the time that should have gone into the programmes themselves.
The core problem was simple and expensive: life-changing work, hidden behind a broken digital experience.
Built in layers.
A full brand and website rebuild that carried the credibility needed to win school and council contracts, paired with local SEO and schema markup so their programmes finally showed up when the right people searched. Warm and trustworthy, without looking amateur.
A custom booking and payment system replaced the Facebook-and-bank-transfer process end to end. Parents and school administrators could find an event and book it in minutes, on any device. That alone gave back 18 hours of admin every month.
Conversion tracking and analytics built in from the start, so Gabriels could see which programmes drew interest and where bookings came from, rather than guessing.
Event bookings rose 329% year on year. Traffic from search and social grew 564%, engagement and time on site by 124%, and the team reclaimed 18 hours a month from manual admin. More importantly, the professional presence opened doors that were previously shut: foundation funding, and the confidence to approach schools and councils across the country.
The quality and standard of the work produced for our website were far beyond my expectations. The team fully understood what we wanted and produced a clear, informative website that fully met our needs. We get so many compliments.