A website for The Trussell Trust and (almost) every food bank in the UK
Trussell Trust’s local foodbank teams now have the ability to effortlessly create and update multiple local websites.
The challenge
The Trussell Trust runs a network of over 440 local food banks. The amount of time it was taking to manage all of the websites was causing serious problems. They needed an effective charity website and a method for creating and managing local foodbank sites.
The problem
We created a website cloning system so that The Trussell Trust can quickly create and manage new foodbank websites.
What we did
- Our discovery workshops with Trussell Trust staff, ideas stand at The Foodbank Conference, focus groups and surveys helped us to form a clear vision and definition of outcomes. We used this information to develop Trussell Trust’s digital brand.
- In addition to the charity website, we designed a local site solution that could be cloned for each individual foodbank. Each foodbank volunteers team is responsible for their local website and so we focused on making the setup of each new site quick, easy and consistent. This reduced the burden on the central communications staff.
- A content delivery system (CDN) was set up so that local teams could share media files. This dramatically reduced the cost of hosting a potentially complex system and speeds up the website loading for users – a factor in search engine performance.
- We designed a custom appeals feature, introduced a blog network platform (linking their main and foodbank site content,) and created bolder, emotive messages across the website to communicate urgency and encourage immediate action.
- To allow local food banks to express some individual creativity, we designed four custom themes and five custom post types.
- We removed unnecessary barriers, such as downloadable paper forms, that were preventing supporters from taking action and replaced these with online forms. Supporters can go on to make donations quickly and easily, without being redirected to another website.
- Our in-house Quality Assurance and Testing team carried out internal testing, user acceptance testing and post-launch snagging, ensuring high standards across all sites.
The result
Trussell Trust staff can now rapidly create and populate new local sites at any time, empowering foodbank teams to communicate with their local audiences.
It has resulted in increased donations and traffic and reduced ongoing hosting costs.
