We’re incredibly pleased to announce that over the coming months, we’ll be working on a new brand strategy and user-centred design project for Family Journeys. This initiative is part of our commitment to strengthen and support the communities we live in, by providing pro-bono services to local charities and public sector organisations.
Family Journeys is a remarkable charity with a child-centric focus. They’re dedicated to strengthening the bonds between parents and children, by facilitating access to a range of services, support and information. Their services include family connection (known legally as ‘child contact’), family mediation, and child-led intensive family support interventions to assist and support families navigating separation, relationship breakdown, and conflict. This involves working with a broad range of stakeholders including children, parents, courts, solicitors, social workers, and other public and third-sector agencies.
The challenge
Family Journeys has been in operation since the early 1980s. In the last few years, the organisation has grown significantly. This means they now need to explain a wider range of services to a broader range of people. They are currently in the process of reviewing and developing their services to ensure they meet the needs of all stakeholders.
Our biggest challenge at Family Journeys is ensuring all children, parents and family members who access our supports feel safe, cared for, and understood. All our work is reinforced by holding the child centre within their family system and being trauma-responsive in all we do. Border Crossing UX is helping us achieve this strong message of support to everyone who reaches out to Family Journeys during their earliest touchpoints with us.
– Jane Denmark, Co-CEO of Family Journeys
Rather than just seeing this as a tactical exercise, Family Journeys are keen to look at things from a strategic perspective, which can then inform any tactical decisions made in terms of how they update their identity and touchpoints and how they communicate to such a broad range of stakeholders in the future.
Ultimately, Family Journeys wants to ensure:
- They meet the needs of children and families and help them overcome the challenges they’re likely to face when there is separation or conflict.
- All content and touchpoints they maintain reflect their understanding of trauma and other adversity on children.
Our approach
Over the coming months, we’ll be providing the support the Family Journeys team needs to update their brand strategy and approach to communicating their services. We’ll then ensure this is applied appropriately across all of their key touch points. This will involve working closely with the Family Journeys team to:
- Frame: Identify and prioritise problems to be solved.
- Discover: Evaluate the current state.
- Define: Collaboratively develop an updated brand strategy.
- Generate: Design, refine, and apply tactical solutions.
- Deliver: Launch revised touchpoints and provide the ongoing support required.
I am looking forward to hearing children and families arriving at Family Journeys in a relaxed and positive mindset because our values and approach have been clearly shared and felt with them from the very outset – whether this be from first reading about us on our website, or from the early communications and shared materials received at referral point.
We are incredibly grateful to the team at Border Crossing UX who have shared an open and transparent approach in achieving the above aims and have been an absolute pleasure to work with.
– Jane Denmark, Co-CEO of Family Journeys
About Family Journeys
Family Journeys provides support to children to maintain positive connections with their parents and missing family members when separation, relationship breakdown, and other factors (such as substance use, history of family conflict or parental mental illness), damage or disrupt their relationships. Many families are referred to Family Journeys via Family Courts or solicitors, but they also welcome self-referrals when families wish to address relationship breakdown without entering the court system. Family Journeys is focussed on the presenting needs of the child, taking time to invest in understanding the child’s views on their current arrangements to see their family members, and sharing the views of the child with active decision makers, including parents and appointed court Sheriffs.
Family Journeys understands that this journey is difficult for everyone involved and offers holistic family support to all affected by the relationship breakdown and family restructuring. They believe in hope and achieving successful co-parenting arrangements, supporting stakeholders to achieve a shared goal of a happy, thriving, and resilient child.
Learn more at: https://www.familyjourneys.scot/about
