A brand in its nascent stage
“Art therapists and early-career artists have long worked in Britain’s psychiatric hospitals, running classes and painting murals to aid patient recovery. Hospital Rooms takes that to the next level by commissioning internationally famous contemporary artists—including Anish Kapoor, Tschabalala Self and Julian Opie—to produce art for display, often on high-security wards. Most artists also run workshops with patients to involve them in the creative process.”
This is what the New York Times wrote about Hospital Rooms, a nonprofit on a mission to enhance Britain’s mental health care environments through art and creativity.
Since its inception, Hospital Rooms has had various successes, such as being featured in prestigious publications, forming great partnerships with leading art brands, and sending materials boxes worth several hundred pounds to 750 mental health locations across the country.
However, despite these remarkable achievements, Hospital Rooms had a problem: their brand was not yet fully established to reflect the vision of its founders, Tim and Niamh. The brand’s positioning was also unclear.
While quite effective in showcasing their impactful work, the organization’s visual identity and online presence didn’t resonate with the full depth of their mission. The website, in particular, presented challenges with its lack of coherence, an unclear user journey, and an inconsistent tone of voice. These factors hindered Hospital Rooms from connecting with stakeholders—including potential funders and partners—and sharing their compelling story with the general public.
Recognizing the importance of a refined identity, Hospital Rooms sought a comprehensive brand refresh and website redesign. This strategic overhaul aimed to align their branding with their values and ethos, ultimately creating an identity that would embody their mission and elevate their impact in the community.
“Our old website didn’t reflect the creativity and magic of what we do. It lacked the colour and artistic flair we are known for and that we strive to embed into every project we complete in NHS mental health services.
Sometimes the nature of what we do can be hidden and discrete—the NHS wards we work on are often secure environments, not easily or at all accessible to the public—so the challenge with our website was to let people in, show them what we do and how, and most importantly to be able to demonstrate the visual and emotional impact of our work.”
— Roisin Mennell, Marketing and Communications Manager, Hospital Rooms
Faced with these challenges, Hospital Rooms chose to partner with us.
Having recognized our expertise in complex branding and redesign projects and our proven track record of transforming brands like MDC, Breathe For Change, and CORE Learning, the Hospital Rooms team was confident we were the right partner for this rebranding journey.
Our team’s deep understanding of the unique challenges faced by nonprofits, coupled with our strategic and creative prowess, positioned us to deliver exceptional results. Plus, Hospital Rooms received a dedicated grant to fund this digital transformation work, so we had the resources to fully bring this project’s vision to life.
Here’s how we navigated the complexities of the Hospital Rooms project—from brand development to web design—to create a best-in-class site that reflects the organization’s mission and values.
Brand development: From digital audits to a strategic identity
The journey began with a series of social, content, and digital audits designed to uncover Hospital Rooms’ strengths, weaknesses, opportunities for growth, and potential threats. These audits provided a comprehensive understanding of the organization’s current landscape and led to actionable recommendations and next steps that would enable Hospital Rooms to address the identified issues strategically.
For example, the website audit uncovered poor UX and user journeys across the website, and a good way to fix this would be to update the top-level menu and navigation as much as possible to reflect desired user journeys.
Similarly, the owned and paid media audits uncovered the lack of a clearly defined top-of-funnel strategy to grow awareness of Hospital Rooms through paid ads, owned channels, and earned media. One of the key recommendations here was to launch top-of-funnel paid campaigns on Meta Business Suite and Google Ads.
Running in parallel was the brand strategy work, a critical component of rebranding. At Literal Humans, we believe in tailoring strategies to each project’s unique needs, which means that we often collaborate with specialist consultants to provide the best results for our clients.
For this project, we brought in Danielle, our specialist branding consultant, who led brand strategy work that would give Hospital Rooms a competitive edge while laying the foundation for sustainable growth.
The brand strategy work was rooted in a deep immersion process involving workshops and interviews with key stakeholders, who found the experience to be “brilliant.” This approach helped us:
- Dive deep into Hospital Rooms’ company, brand, organization, and operating environment, forming the foundation for a more robust, more insightful brand DNA.
- Identify what truly matters to stakeholders and why by asking the right questions to the right people and gathering rich data and insights crucial for developing their brand DNA.
- Clarify the brand’s Purpose & Vision—the “Why?”, its Mission—the “What?”, and its Values—the “How?”.
All the brand strategy work resulted in the creation of a comprehensive Brand Strategy Report, a document that encapsulates the brand’s DNA, purpose, mission, vision, and values, as well as potential growth opportunities.
With this report, Hospital Rooms can begin to effectively communicate their unique value, connecting with their audience on a deeper emotional level, ultimately leading to long-term success and enhanced competitive awareness.
The next step involved creating mood boards and conducting research to inform the development of a new identity that better communicates what Hospital Rooms stands for.
After extensive discussions, Hospital Rooms chose the visual identity that resonated most with their brand. We then moved into the development of a visual system and logo. The visual system encompassed everything from typography and color palettes to photography.
For the logo, we crafted several concepts based on the insights gathered from discussions with key stakeholders, ultimately landing on a design that reflects the therapeutic and supportive nature of the work Hospital Rooms does. The chosen logo embodies the idea of “someone with an arm around another person, as though viewed from above.”
All the work on brand strategy, mood boards and research, and visual and logo development concluded with the creation of new brand guidelines for Hospital Rooms. These guidelines provide a comprehensive overview, covering everything from the brand’s values, personality, tone of voice, audience, and stakeholders to the entire visual system and how it should be applied.
These new brand guidelines will ensure consistency across all touchpoints, from digital platforms to print materials, ensuring that Hospital Rooms presents a unified and compelling identity to the world.
The Hospital Rooms team expressed their appreciation for the level of detail in the written guidelines, noting that they are a perfect foundation for the brand’s visual work.
The website design: Creating a best-in-class masterpiece
With a solid brand foundation in place, we turned our attention to the website redesign. Our goal was to create a user-centric site that would be visually appealing and functionally robust, offering an intuitive user experience.
The first step in this process involved collaborating closely on the sitemap. The Hospital Rooms team provided valuable input, as they already had a clear vision for how they wanted to structure the site. Their insights were instrumental in establishing the foundation for a site that would be both informative and engaging.
We established a fortnightly meeting schedule with their team to ensure seamless communication and alignment throughout the website redesign process. These sessions were crucial for keeping everyone on the same page, addressing any concerns promptly, and making sure the project stayed on track. For example, in the initial stages of the redesign, we used the meetings to get a good understanding of the website’s purpose and what it should convey to the user.
Once we had a good idea of the site we wanted to create, we created low-fidelity (Lo-Fi) wireframes, which outlined the basic structure and flow of the website. We held two feedback sessions during this phase to refine the wireframes and ensure they met the expectations of the Hospital Rooms team. The client noted that plotting everything in Figma wireframes was a thorough process that helped them visualize exactly what they wanted visitors to do on the site.
After the lo-fi wireframes were approved, we transitioned to high-fidelity (Hi-Fi) wireframes. This stage involved more detailed design work, where the visual aspects of the site began to take shape. The Hi-Fi wireframes were a significant step forward, as they provided a clearer picture of the final product and set the stage for the design outputs.
Bringing it all together
As part of the website redesign, we also took on copywriting for the web pages, making sure that the content was as compelling and cohesive as the new visual identity. Once the copy was polished and aligned with the brand’s refreshed tone and design was complete, our developer worked her magic to bring the vision to life.
The redesign was strategically phased into two key launches to maximize impact and ensure a seamless transition:
- Launch 1: This phase focused on the entire website, including the comprehensive Digital Art School. This phase ensured that the main site was fully functional and delivered a rich, immersive experience that captivated users as soon as they landed on it.
- Launch 2: The second phase centered on the shop/ecommerce component of the website. This phase was critical for enhancing the site’s commercial capabilities and providing a smooth shopping experience for users that complemented the overall brand experience.
The decision to separate the ecommerce and whole website launches allowed the Hospital Rooms team more time to clean up website elements and ensure everything was right, enhancing the overall effectiveness of the site. In the end, this phased approach successfully combined design, content, and functionality to create a cohesive and powerful digital presence.
Beyond branding: Google Ads Grant and training
In addition to the rebranding and website redesign, Hospital Rooms tasked us with setting up a dashboard to track their performance and a Google Ads Grant to enhance their online visibility.
Our team managed the grant setup, ensuring compliance with Google’s strict requirements, and provided training to the Hospital Rooms internal team on effectively managing and optimizing their Google Ads campaigns. This training empowered their team to take full advantage of the grant, driving more traffic to their newly redesigned site.
The Hospital Rooms project was not without its challenges. We faced some delays in the launch due to the complexity of the redesign and the need to align closely with the vision of the Hospital Rooms team.
However, we overcame these challenges through effective communication, strategic planning, and a commitment to delivering the highest quality work.
For instance, the phased launch approach also helped mitigate risks, ensuring that each component of the site was launched smoothly and effectively. The client also acknowledged the Jotform system for flagging errors or edits during QA, appreciating how quick and easy it was to submit queries and see visually how the development team was progressing with edits.
The combined expertise of our team—from the strategists to the designers, copywriters, and developers—ensured that the project was executed efficiently and met the high standards set by the Hospital Rooms team.
We are proud of our work on this project and believe that the redesigned website reflects the unique and impactful nature of Hospital Rooms’ mission.
“Collaborating with the Literal Humans team was a seamless, collaborative process throughout. We appreciated their willingness to bring in experts at different stages of the project—branding consultants, web developers and paid ads specialists.
We felt guided and held throughout the process. They were receptive to our changing creative minds, especially when we didn’t know how to articulate what we wanted—they helped us realise what was crucial for our brand to communicate—distilling our core values and messaging.”
— Roisin Mennell, Marketing and Communications Manager, Hospital Rooms
Delivering results: A visual and functional success
Altogether, our team created 33 new pages for the site, each meticulously designed to ensure a cohesive and responsive experience across both web and mobile platforms. We designed the pages to reflect Hospital Rooms’ brand and mission, providing an engaging user experience for their audience.
One of the key requests from Hospital Rooms was to make the Digital Art School section of the website feel like a mini-site within the larger site.
Digital Art School is not just a project; it’s an integral part of their mission and it needed to be presented as such. We delivered a design that made the Digital Art School stand out, with a layout that is both warm and inviting yet sophisticated enough to appeal to artists and art enthusiasts.
The challenge was to balance the warmth and accessibility of the content with the seriousness of the art projects. The new design ensures that users can easily navigate Digital Art School with a simple user journey that requires minimal clicks.
The website now tells the compelling stories of the artists and projects, making the site not only a place to learn but also a destination that draws users in with its storytelling.
Visual and brand impact
The rebranding and website redesign have strengthened Hospital Rooms’ position in the art and mental health sectors.
Feedback from various stakeholders, including funders and donors, has been overwhelmingly positive, with many noting that the new brand and website more accurately reflect the organization’s vision and values. The new site does an excellent job of conveying the professionalism and impact of the work Hospital Rooms does, making it more likely for stakeholders to engage and support the organization.
Digital Art School, in particular, has become a standout feature of the site, attracting both new participants and artists who want to collaborate with Hospital Rooms. The new storytelling approach has also enhanced the site’s ability to communicate the organization’s mission, with users spending more time exploring the stories behind the art projects.
“The rebranding and website redesign has been transformative for us. The outcome has professionalised what we do and given us the framework to be able to show off our incredible work to prospective collaborators—artists, NHS teams, people with mental health needs looking for a creative outlet, and not to mention donors and funders who are vital to sustaining our work.”
— Roisin Mennell, Marketing and Communications Manager, Hospital Rooms
Quantitative successes
With 94% of first impressions influenced by web design and 38% of consumers abandoning sites with unattractive layouts, it’s clear that design matters when it comes to increasing web traffic and SEO performance.
Since the website relaunch, Hospital Rooms has seen remarkable growth, including a 105% increase in users and a 121% rise in sessions. Additionally, there has been a 52% increase in clicks and a 59% improvement in CTR.
All this growth in website traffic has translated into a 120% increase in file downloads and a 542% increase in donate page views. These results demonstrate that the updated website and branding are not only attracting more visitors but also engaging them in meaningful ways—whether through resource downloads or increased interest in supporting Hospital Rooms’ mission.
Riding on the success of the rebrand and website launch, Hospital Rooms has expressed interest in continued collaboration with Literal Humans. We are currently providing ongoing support for the website, ensuring it remains up-to-date and fully optimized.
Additionally, Hospital Rooms has requested further training on Google Ads and Google Analytics 4 as they continue to expand their digital marketing efforts.
And how did the team describe their experience working with Literal Humans?
“Fun! The whole journey with Literal Humans was so joyful and rewarding for us—from the brand strategy brainstorming sessions to the logo development and website redesign. We thoroughly benefitted from the collaborative and flexible ways of working, and their expertise along the way helped us achieve an outcome we are so proud of.”
— Roisin Mennell, Marketing and Communications Manager, Hospital Rooms
For many nonprofits, branding often takes a backseat to immediate concerns like income generation and operational priorities. The pressure to focus on short-term results can make it challenging to invest in branding.
But, as the Hospital Rooms rebranding journey shows, a strong brand is crucial for long-term success and measurable outcomes.
The impact of this strategic effort is evident in both the impressive numbers and the positive reception of the new identity. The enhanced positioning and visual identity have created a strong presence that fully embodies the pioneering work Hospital Rooms is doing.
Could your brand benefit from a similar uplift and results?
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