Practical Participation

The Sex Sense Website

Sex Sense is a local sexual health advice service for young people in Portsmouth & South-East Hampshire. With a small team covering a large area they needed an easy to maintain online presence which would raise awareness of the services they offer – and would make sure young people could easily find out about clinics and drop in advice sessions available to them. We developed a Drupal based website for the service – and explored how online advertising and widgets could help raise awareness of the Sex Sense service.

Creative consultation
Finding out what young people wanted to know about the Sex Sense service was a top priority when we started development – but because of the nature of the service – getting a group of service users together for a workshop wasn’t going to work. So, instead we designed an accessible visual worksheet that Sex Sense staff could ask young people at drop-in sessions to take a look at, or which they could use to have informal discussions with small groups of young people.

The responses we got helped set priorities for the site’s development. A map of clinic locations, and details of bus-times were felt to be particularly important – so we included both Google Maps and Transport Direct’s route planner into the site.

Web strategy, not just websites

Consultation Kit used by Sex Sense Staff (download full PDF version)

We were clear from the start that Sex Sense needed a web strategy, not just a website. Information about the service is found on a variety of other websites, and we knew that to raise awareness of the service amongst young people we couldn’t just rely on them searching for ‘Sex Sense Portsmouth’ or typing in the web address. So, we looked broader than just website creation and we have been working on:

• Making sure the site is search engine optimised to a variety of key words that young people may search on;

• Providing Sex Sense with information on how to use tools like Google Alerts and advanced search strings to find out who else is featuring information about their service – so they ensure correct details are given on other websites;

• Providing guidance on how to encourage other relevant sites to link to information on the Sex Sense site;

• Providing RSS feeds of key information from the site such as clinic and drop-in session times, and basic information about the service – so that other sites can use these, rather than copying data;

• Making use of online advertising to target information to a geographically specific area;

We’ve encountered some challenges with using social media sites to target online advertising for a sexual health service at under 13 – 19 year olds, but are continuing to explore and evaluate effective online advertising for the service.

A bit more background
We first started thinking about the need for web or content strategies at BarCampUKGovWeb08 and you can read a few reflections on that here.