SIAB ‘Blog in a Bag’ No. 52: We welcome the new School in a Bag website  

“Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls….we are proud to present to you…(drum roll please)…the new schoolinabag.org website”.

We know that throughout this ghastly COVID pandemic, there have been some positive outcomes and one of these for School in a Bag has certainly been the time it has afforded us to finally get a new website designed and built.  We’ll be honest…an upgrade for our previous website (created in 2012) was long overdue and it has been on our ‘To Do’ list for the last four years to bring the work we do up to date. So much has happened in the past eight years – pulling together the content has been a big concentrated chunk of work which, in our normal working environment, we just were unable to find the time to shut ourselves away and produce it.  So, if you felt we have been a little quiet since the world went in to freeze frame at the end of March, this is the reason… lockdown has provided that productive opportunity and finally, we are delighted that our new, modern, glossy site is now live and available for you to peruse!



The brief we set ourselves was a simple one:

To create a clean, easily navigable site that provides an in-depth view of our work, both historic and current which is user friendly, interactive and interesting whilst enabling the user to donate and track a funded SchoolBag with simplistic ease.

For viewers that want to go through it systematically, the website gives a comprehensive, honest account of the way we work which is backed up with case studies, strong images and video clips, whilst for those that want to jump straight to the section they are after, it should still provide enough information within the text and imagery to give a good overview of our work, be it through our operational activity, partnerships we have fostered or fundraising events and processes we carry out.  Effectively, the ‘Home/Why SchoolBags/Our Work and About Us’ tabs provide the What?, Why?, Where?, How?, When? and Who? information about our work whilst ‘Get Involved/Blog/Shop and Donate’ are calls to action to support us and gain the current news.  We hope you are as pleased with the results as we are.

The eagle-eyed among you will notice a new addition of an e-commerce ‘Shop’.  Naturally, you can fund a SchoolBag through this platform (new supporters within the UK have already funded SchoolBags this way!) and some of our key merchandise items are on sale now…but, you can also expect some new additions in the not too distant future which we are very excited about :).  Keep a look out for these arriving soon!



And, we can now offer our supporters more options with regard to the type of donation they want to make – be it funding SchoolBags or funding us an organisation.  The latter of which has become critical for our survival as we face the prospect of having to raise the £100,000 deficit in lost operational revenue from the postponement of Home Farm Fest and our other ‘In house’ events courtesy of the COVID pandemic. We will go in to more detail regarding our plight to raise this money through our ‘I Donate Monthly, Can You?’ campaign next week and inform you all about our goals and targets to try and achieve this.



But for now, we hope you will take the time to explore the website.  Please let us know what you think and if you are able, please share, share, share it to everyone that you know so that they can see it too.  Perhaps you could encourage them to subscribe to our marketing mailing list on the home page at the same time? 🙂

Our final word is one of thanks – to Hannah Gauntlett, who during her time here at School in a Bag put together the framework for the website and to the patient and brilliant team at CETSAT, who worked tirelessly to realise our vision in to the wonderful website that we present to you today.

Thank you
Team School in a Bag  – Transforming Lives Through Education

School in a Bag is a charity born out of the Piers Simon Appeal, a charity set-up by Founder & CEO, Luke Simon, in memory of his older brother Piers, who lost his life in the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004. To date, over 118,800 SchoolBags have been distributed to children in 45 countries around the world, giving them the necessary tools to be able to attend school and therefore have a lifeline out of poverty and hardship. Equally, if they have been affected by war or a natural disaster and had to flee their home, the SchoolBags provide the tools to be able to gain some stability and normality back in their lives by attending school. To see more of the work we do, please take a look at our website: www.schoolinabag.org