Over the next few days, you’ll see some big changes to Gingerbread’s website and social media channels.

Why have we changed our brand?

The first thing you’ll notice is that Gingerbread’s logo, colours, font and photography are different. But our brand is about so much more than how we look. What underpins these changes is a shift in what single parents need from Gingerbread today.

We last updated our brand over a decade ago. In that time Gingerbread, and the world we live in, have changed dramatically. Single parents have always faced significant disadvantages. But years of austerity, the pandemic and the cost of living crisis have made things worse in every way.

We’ve been on the front line for over 100 years, supporting single parents directly when they need us. And we’re sick and tired of seeing the same cycles of injustice, inequality and prejudice that keep single parents trapped in debt, poverty and poor mental health.

Things can’t go on as they are. Something needs to change.

That’s why we launched a bold and ambitious new strategy in 2022, to help us fight for a fairer, more equal society where single parents don’t just survive, but thrive.

So, we need an equally bold and ambitious brand to help us bring this fight to life.

Our new brand puts a bigger emphasis on our campaigning work, reflecting the origins of the organisation when it was set up in 1918. It puts accessibility at its heart, so we can operate more effectively in an increasingly digital world and reach more single parents. And it empowers us to be bolder in our words and in our actions.

What we do hasn’t changed. We’ll keep providing expert advice and information for single parents, so that they have the tools to support their children and themselves. And we’ll keep providing a support network so that, with Gingerbread, no single parent is ever alone.

But our new brand gives us the tools to do even more.

We can shout more loudly about the challenges single parents face in 2023. We can demand changes from government, employers and wider society, that stop the cycle of injustice, inequality and prejudice. And we can bring more people together to build a movement of single parents, all fighting for a fairer society.

What’s changed on the website?

Over 700,000 single parents visit the Gingerbread website every single year. That means it’s our most effective tool for supporting single parents – and it’s so important that we get it right.

It made sense financially to launch the new brand and website at the same time. But the colours, fonts and photography aren’t the only thing that’s changed.

For the last 18 months, we’ve been researching, evaluating and designing Gingerbread’s new website. From this research, we realised that the old website wasn’t easy to use. It was hard to find what you were looking for. The structure and size of the site made navigating it difficult. And even if you did find the right page, jargon and poor page design could make it difficult to understand.

We knew we had to fix these problems and provide a first-class service for single parents.

The new website:

• Has a new streamlined structure, making it easier to navigate
• Has an improved search functionality, so things are easier to find
• Has reduced the total number of pages, while keeping the same level of detail
• Has an information section that’s been completely rewritten, so it’s easier to understand
• Has a new ‘filter’ function, so you only see the pages relevant to you, and a new ‘save page’ function, so you don’t have to search for the same pages every time

And what you see this week is just the start. We’ve got plans to make the website even better, with new functionality and new content still to come over the next few months.

Any thoughts or questions?

If you have any comments or questions about any of the changes to our brand and website, please email web@gingerbread.org.uk