Alcoholics Anonymous
Founded in 1935, Alcoholics Anonymous (‘AA’) is a fellowship of over two million members worldwide who share their experiences to solve their common problem and help others to recover from alcoholism. AA’s only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking.
The brief
The primary aims of the AA website are to make it easy to find meetings and promote the message of recovery. Easy access to information and support must be available to four groups – newcomers, existing members, referring professionals and friends and family of alcoholics. Privacy and anonymity are essential elements, along with effortless navigation on all devices.
The website
Using existing brand guidelines, we delivered a considered and consistent navigation, clear hierarchy, fresh modern design and easily identifiable calls to action.
Key functionality enables a quick and easy search for a meeting by location, day, timeslot and physical accessibility needs, to get results that are highly pertinent to the user. Intelligent filtering provides detailed meeting information on dedicated meeting pages that can now be bookmarked, shared or sent to a friend.
Live meeting information is delivered to the website through a custom API integration with AA’s bespoke CRM system. Enhanced privacy features and clear mapping deliver an optimised experience.
The mapping service was replaced and the process for the search system performing address lookups was optimised. This prevents the website making unnecessary requests to the mapping/geolocation service, as well as caching the results received.
The result
AA now offers easy access to meeting information that’s specific to the search criteria of the service user. Regional teams maintain their own supplementary information, streamlining business processes and reducing administration, while displaying information in a new standardised format.
Clear, well laid out pages offer a straightforward and intuitive journey. After careful selection of a new interactive map provider, AA is now making significant financial savings in mapping service fees, while increasing the anonymity and privacy of visitors by eliminating services with bad privacy stances.
