Red Badger | Customer Success

The Challenge:

A small foundation, a global community, and a website that couldn't keep up.

The NR2F1 Foundation supports 500 diagnosed families in more than 50 countries and is often the first port of call for newly diagnosed families, clinicians and scientific researchers learning about Bosch-Boonstra-Schaaf Optic Atrophy Syndrome (BBSOAS).

Their existing website was costly to maintain, hard to update, and didn't follow accessibility, SEO or internationalisation best practices. This was a real problem when most BBSOAS patients are visually impaired and the audience spans seven languages and dozens of countries.

Red Badger was brought in to design and build a sustainable platform: a website the Foundation's small team could run themselves, that performed for users with assistive technologies, and that helped families find the Foundation in the first place.

Our approach:

Discovery first, then a platform built for low-cost ownership.

We started with a discovery phase, workshops and interviews with the Foundation's board, to map the key audiences, their needs and frustrations, and the technical goals for the new platform.

That shaped a customer-centric plan organised around clear objectives:

Raise awareness of the NR2F1 Foundation and the work they do
Provide information about the NR2F1 gene and BBSOAS
Provide resources for families living with BBSOAS
Guide families on how to register in the biorepository, which is a database of information about people with BBSOAS for research purposes
Provide resources for healthcare professionals, researchers, and pharmaceutical companies
Provide a blog for the NR2F1 Foundation to share updates and stories
Provide a donation page for people to support the NR2F1 Foundation

The results:

A React platform built for accessibility, SEO and near-zero maintenance.

After several prototypes, we delivered a server-side-rendered React website backed by a headless, localised CMS. This was chosen so the Foundation's volunteers can edit content without developer support, and so future features don't drive up running costs.

Solution stack: React (server-side rendered), Contentful (headless CMS), Vercel (hosting), WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility, internationalisation with localised URLs, structured data and semantic HTML.

FOUR PILLARS:

EASY TO MAINTAIN: Contentful, part of our solution stack, gives developers, content creators and editors a flexible space to work together,so the Foundation's team can update content independently.
ACCESSIBLE TO ALL USERS: Because BBSOAS often affects vision, the site is fully compatible with screen readers and meets WCAG 2.2 AA. UX and UI were user-tested and iterated for every device.
HANDLES INTERNATIONALISATION AND LOCALISATION: Content is published in seven languages with localised URL paths and language-appropriate date and number formatting.
SEO-FIRST ARCHITECTURE: Server-side rendering, structured data and semantic HTML make the Foundation easier for search engines to discover. This is critical for newly diagnosed families finding help.

Outcomes:

From a hard-to-find website to a global platform driving real-world engagement.

The new platform has measurably raised awareness of BBSOAS and the Foundation's work. Following launch, the Foundation has seen a 30% increase in event attendance across both family-facing gatherings and pharma-research forums, bringing the two communities the Foundation exists to serve closer together.

By improving discoverability for newly diagnosed families, supporting researchers and clinicians with credible information, and giving the Foundation a platform their volunteers can actually run, the website now does the strategic job it was built to do: educate, advocate and accelerate research.

Delivery and assets are publicly accessible, including a public GitHub repository with contributing guidelines, a Figma design system available on request, and an open backlog of issues for future contributors.

“As President of the Foundation, I am truly humbled by the kindness and professionalism shown by the team. As a mother of a child with BBSOAS, I am deeply grateful for the support we've received. It is a tremendous comfort to know that there are people fighting for my daughter and for all the families impacted by BBSOAS.”

Customer Success Stories

A Rare Condition. A Global Community. One Platform.

Red Badger designed, built and continues to support a fast, accessible, multilingual digital platform for the NR2F1 Foundation, a global community supporting families and researchers connected to BBSOAS, a rare neurodevelopmental disorder.