Trusting someone with your son, in your own language

The problem

Boys To Men Retreat runs four days in Ericeira for boys aged 9 to 16 — challenge, adventure, and a bit of growing up. The people they need to convince are parents, and they are being asked to hand over their child to strangers in another country for four days.

Everything about the website was working against that. It had been built before phones were how people browsed, so the parents reading it — on a phone, in the evening, half-deciding — were pinching and scrolling through a layout meant for a desktop. And it only spoke English, while the families come from the Netherlands, Portugal, France and Spain.

Asking a parent to make that decision in a second language, on a site that's awkward to read, is asking a lot.

What they got

A site that works where parents actually read it. Rebuilt for phones first, so the information that earns trust — who runs this, what happens each day, what's included, who else has been — is easy to take in on a small screen.

Five languages, properly. English, Dutch, Portuguese, French and Spanish, with visitors landing automatically in their own language rather than hunting for a flag icon in a corner.

An application people finish. Instead of one intimidating page of questions, the application moves in short steps, so a parent starts it without bracing themselves — and completed applications arrive in the team's inbox laid out clearly, ready to act on.

All the original substance kept. Every piece of copy that made the retreat sound like what it is was preserved. This was a redesign of how it reads, not a rewrite of what it says.

What it means for them

A Dutch parent researching summer options on their phone now gets the full picture in Dutch, in a form that's actually readable, and can apply in the same sitting rather than deciding to come back later and not coming back.

For a retreat that fills by reputation and word of mouth across several countries, removing the friction between "this sounds right for my son" and a submitted application is the whole job — and that's what changed.