Scottish Women's Institutes

The client

A national institution since its inception in 1917, the SWI was founded to bring women in rural communities together in a rapidly changing world. With thousands of members across more than four hundred Institutes, it’s one of Scotland’s largest and oldest membership organisations.

Their 2024-26 Strategic Plan highlighted the development of a new website as a key goal. New growth in membership numbers in recent years, and a refreshed brand, triggered the need to reach out to a new, digital native audience, to attract and encourage younger members without excluding their more traditional user base.

We proposed a new website for the SWI with a member-led approach from start to finish, talking to a panel of members to understand the role of the SWI in their lives and ensuring members were able to contribute to the new platform at key stages of development.

The challenge

The problem wasn’t the SWI itself. Across Scotland, women were showing up every month to learn, socialise and build the kind of friendships that last decades. The organisation was doing exactly what it had always done. The website just wasn’t telling that story.

It felt institutional and inward-facing. It made sense if you already knew who the SWI are, but didn’t do much to bring in new faces who don’t.

Key insights that shaped the project came from talking to members directly. Women don’t join the SWI because they’re looking for an organisation. They turn up for something specific, whether it’s a craft workshop, an event, a nudge from a friend – and the community reveals itself after. The brief was to build a website that understood that, and led with it.

The concept that came out of that insight sits right at the top of the site. ‘I came for the crafts. I stayed for the friendships’. A rotating headline where the first word changes (crafts, laughs, baking, skills, events), but the second half stays the same. Every variation is a different way in.

A woman who identifies with one finds her reflection in the headline. A woman who relates to another finds hers a moment later. The design presents multiple entry points simultaneously without flattening the SWI into a single pitch, because SWI membership was never monolithic. Women in their thirties join the same institute as women in their seventies. That plurality deserved to be honoured.

The result

The site was built around the same principle throughout – lead with the reason to show up, and let the community do the rest. Events front and centre, a find your nearest institute tool that makes it feel immediately local, and a tone that sounds like a person rather than an organisation.

The website launched as part of a broader modernisation programme that has, for the first time in decades, stabilised SWI membership. New institutes have opened across Scotland, and the organisation has built partnerships with the Young Women’s Movement, three Scottish universities, Glasgow Women’s Library and National Museums Scotland. That’s not just a website doing its job. That’s an organisation finding its footing again.