Raremap

Empowering a national charity through stability, speed and trust

Rare Disease Research UK was established to connect and strengthen the UK’s rare disease research community. Raremap is a digital platform designed to help people discover organisations, groups and functions across that ecosystem.

Challenge

Rare disease research depends on collaboration between academic, clinical, industry, charity, patient and public-sector organisations. The digital challenge was to turn a complex set of relationships into something people could actually search, understand and maintain.

The platform needed structured organisation data, useful filters, clear category pages, profile management, moderation, and a route for organisations to request changes without creating editorial chaos.

Solution

I built a custom WordPress block theme using PorterWP, with dedicated content types for organisations, groups and functions, and taxonomies for organisation groups, disease areas and research functions.

The site includes filtered organisation search, linked group and function pages, icon and colour-driven category cards, data imports from structured spreadsheets, Gravity Forms integration, AJAX form handling and a custom Raremap account workflow.

The Raremap workflow allows organisation representatives to join, manage profile requests, submit changes, request deletion, and move through approval, rejection and notification states. Admins can review submissions inside WordPress and publish approved changes to the live directory.

Outcome

The result is a structured, searchable WordPress platform for a complex research ecosystem. It gives users a clearer route into rare disease organisations and gives the site team a controlled workflow for keeping directory data accurate over time.