Heads Up CIC

Heads Up CIC are a wonderful organisation run by two women who go into primary schools to teach children how to look after their mental health. They, quite rightly in my opinion, work on the premise that it’s never too young to learn.

And they do it without scaring or stressing the youngsters. They use story books and cuddly toys, all based around friendly little characters they’ve created themselves. Their services really are invaluable.

Heads Up came to me a couple of years ago because they were struggling to get someone to build an eCommerce website for them. They didn’t want a website just to show case what they do, but also to sell their story books and cuddly toys for use by schools, families and children who they couldn’t teach in person.

But they’d made a mistake that it is, sadly, very common amongst CICs and charities – they’d got the funding for the website before they’d asked any web designers about how much it might cost to build an eCommerce site, and they amount they’d been awarded was pitifully low.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen this happen, so, luckily for them, I already had a plan of how I could help them stay within their budget whilst making sure that I could still earn a living. I really wish I didn’t have to ask anyone for money but until we go back to bartering and growing our own food I do have bills to pay!

Back to the point – my plan was to set up a ‘skeleton’ shop for them. So I’d add things like a payment method, add the shop details, add the postage details, which was UK only and fixed price p&p so nice and easy. I then added the first product for them, recorded what I was doing, sent them the video and then basically left them to it. Oh, and I built the rest of the website too, but it was the shop where most of the work was.

They’ve now got 10 products on the shop and are still hard at it, making the world a better place one primary school at a time.