Anna Freud
Our newest case study explores the new website we have built for Anna Freud to help them create a world in which all children and young people can reach their full potential.
Anna Freud’s need for a new website
Children and young people are struggling with their mental health more so today than ever before. They are often encouraged to turn to their parents, teachers and those close to them for help.
But who supports the parents and teachers …
Anna Freud provides evidence-based, high-quality information and resources for supporting child mental health, so that parents, teachers and those working with young people are kept fully informed and have access to the latest research, training and guidance on child mental health.
Reason Digital is honoured to partner with Anna Freud — a world-leading mental health charity for children and families — in their mission to create a world in which all children and young people can reach their full potential. Over the past three years, we have been working closely with the charity on various stages of its digital transformation journey. We’ve embarked on several initiatives together, including a rapid and radical rehaul of the Anna Freud website in six months. Yes… you read that correctly. Six months!
Whilst we would not normally recommend embarking on such a complex project in such a short time, we have been itching to tell the story of what we did to make this happen with our client.
This project is a great example of the work we do here at Reason Digital and the synergy of our teams. The impact it has made for Anna Freud on site speed and user experience showcases the benefits of taking a user-focused approach to web development and choosing the best tools for the job at hand (or should we say ‘head’… more on that later!).


An ambitious undertaking
In 2022, Anna Freud launched its ‘Closing the Gap’ strategy. This four-year strategy set out to close the growing chasm between the number of children experiencing poor mental health the UK and those who ultimately receive professional health support for it.
To put some numbers on it, out of the 1.5 million plus children who were affected by significant mental health problems in England in 2019, just one-quarter of them received professional mental health support for them.
With this strategy, Anna Freud aims to close the gap across science and research into supporting child mental health and its implementation. The pioneering research and evidence that the charity had been supporting for over 70 years was still not reaching the hands of those who have the greatest opportunity to implement it — such as teachers, carers, parents, and key workers who are already part of a child’s life and can really make an impact on their mental health. Anna Freud needed to reach new and expansive audiences to fill this gap as the authority on evidence based and best practice support for children and young people when they need it most.
To do so, the charity understood that digital transformation would be a key enabler to improving the accessibility of its work and improving efficiencies in its ways of working.
With a content management system (CMS) approaching its end-of-life and a rebrand underway, Anna Freud sought a digital agency to provide expert guidance and advice to help them figure out the best way forward. After conducting a full competitive procurement process, the charity chose again to partner with Reason Digital to deliver this vital piece of consultancy.
What stood out about Reason [Digital] was meeting us where we are, but with an understanding of our ambition and not trying to limit that ambition. We really appreciated how Reason Digital showed up across that project in adhering to our restrictions and being very flexible around our requirements, but also [being] creative and inspirational in some of the areas where it was required.
Delving deeper
We were keen to learn as much as possible about the charity and it’s Closing the Gap strategy. Despite having worked together before, immersion activities were a crucial step that could not be skipped.
Our team wanted to know everything — from current organisational goals to what people used the website for; from how they wanted the website to generate income for them to what the chief executive likes for breakfast. OK, we didn’t quite go that far — but you get the idea.
Immersion sessions are incredibly valuable to our process. By getting to know clients in this way, we are much more aware of the bigger picture and all the nuances that make them who they are. It makes us better placed to always act for our clients when discussing options and troubleshooting issues later down the line.
With Anna Freud, we used a combination of immersion sessions and depth interviews with executive stakeholders and CMS contributors to explore the Closing the Gap strategy in more depth and establish goals for their web strategy, which included:
- driving income generation,
- balancing innovation with safety
- identifying the content and functionalities the website needed to support.
With a good understanding of the organisational needs from a new website, we then undertook research gap analysis to figure out what we didn’t know about users’ needs — crucially, the needs of those new and expansive audiences that the Closing the Gap strategy is aiming to reach.
We agreed to focus our research on teachers and other professionals — i.e., the ‘doers’ and the ‘leaders’ that support children and young people with their mental health — and how they search for, consume, and return to content that helps them.
Roads over rollercoasters
We started with one question:
“How does the website need to be designed and built to be an effective front door to your offerings, serving your internal and external user needs?”
Previous work conducted by Anna Freud had set some clear value propositions for how the content of the website would serve its users. What we were looking at with our user research was how the content comes together and is delivered to form a user’s journey and experience. Thinking in terms of a theme park — you visit for the rollercoasters (i.e., the content), but it’s the roads, maps, and people that help you get from ride to ride. It is in these details that lies the potential to make it a great day out or one you’d rather forget. Bringing it back to websites — we wanted to know how audiences currently searched and engaged with content online and what was it that frustrated or delighted them.
It’s all about that accessibility…Getting what you need as quickly as possible.


To understand preferences and patterns over a large sample of target audiences, a survey was distributed to participants via a recruitment agency. A smaller sample of participants were also interviewed to facilitate some deeper discussions about the reasons behind their survey responses and to take a closer look at their information seeking behaviours.
Whereas the purpose of this research was to primarily understand user journeys (remember roads, not rollercoasters), we were also able to gather some valuable insights about how users valued and prioritised different types of content — helping us answer some questions around how we prioritise content for launch versus the future, and to gauge what content should be freely available or gated.
Having previously worked together on the co-creation of a parent platform for the Anna Freud website — wherein a similar approach to user research was taken — the charity was confident in our suggested approach to involve their key audiences.
There was a level of empathy and really supportive communication in understanding that this was a co-produced piece of work. Parents from outside the organisation with lived experience with mental health concerns were able to be as active a part [of the project] as a sponsor or a project manager and they were treated with the utmost respect. I think that was a very positive start to our relationship.
The output of this work was a clear website vision that aligned all present and future development of the Anna Freud website to its Closing the Gap strategy.
The New Website Vision
Accompanying this website vision were four overarching goals to which a set of specific recommendations were anchored to. Recommendations ranged from prioritising accessibility to making content easy to return to via a central login system. Having this vision and overarching goals and recommendations provided an anchor for future decisions when choosing the right CMS technology for Anna Freud to move forward with, as well as those decisions that arose during design and build stages and beyond into the continuous improvement of the website.
With a swiftly approaching end-of-life deadline, we knew that some difficult priority decisions would have to be made. Developing the vision and goals provided a much-needed north star for discussions ahead. Anna Freud dove right into the process, and we created a vision that reflects those ambitions, and something that we can continuously improve against to drive their strategy.

Strategic solutioning
There was a very tight timeline with this project in that the version of the CMS that Anna Freud was using would be no longer usable within the year. There were also multiple subsites and integrations involved with Anna Freud’s website offerings, and a new Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool being implemented at the same time — making the choice of what to do next even more complex.
Like with all our projects, we approached this part of the challenge logically and conducted an options analysis to thoroughly review the possible ways in which the charity could proceed.
Our team determined that there were six options for consideration, and they assessed each one according to timelines, cost and internal effort required by Anna Freud to execute the change.
Additional commentary on the advantages, disadvantages and overall feasibility of each option was included. The option that offered the highest value to Anna Freud, and which was most aligned with its strategic digital transformation journey, was to build a new website with a new, headless CMS — where the CMS is separated from the front end of a website — offering better security, speed and flexibility for Anna Freud.
A new front end would allow for a new, more appropriate information architecture to be implemented as well as other recommendations regarding user journeys. The downside, however, was that the work involved in rebuilding the whole site was unfeasible within the deadline.
Reason Digital and Anna Freud’s teams jointly decided to take a ‘Minimum Viable Product’ (MVP) approach to meet the rigorous deadline. Through this approach, navigation could be streamlined and the user experience for internal and external audiences improved when the site was launched. But it did mean that some functionality would be more basic, and all content would not be fully migrated by launch with resourcing as it stood.
Project teams from Reason Digital and Anna Freud worked diligently together to make sure the scope of work was immaculately defined in advance of the build. With an immoveable deadline and thousands of pages of content to migrate, many priority calls had to be made — challenging the whole team to communicate effectively and constructively.
Where we have had our issues, where we have had difficulties in communication, where there's been blockers or concerns, [Reason Digital’s] open transparency and taking that pragmatic approach to it has been really appreciated. We're in a very healthy space now, but I think we got there because we were able to confront issues as they arose
Building the right foundations
Even with a new headless CMS promising better speed and security for the Anna Freud website, the development team were dedicated to optimising site speed from the get-go.
Measures ranged from choosing the best place to host the website, to scheduling in performance improvement work in the weeks leading up to launch. And the hard work paid off. On desktop, website performance went from Lighthouse performance score of 80 to 99 after launch of the new site, and from 61 to 85 on mobile (slower speed on mobile attributable to the loading of the cookie banner). Site security also went from a rating of a D to an A+, offering huge peace of mind to Anna Freud on the security of its data.
Our aim is to achieve the speed and security scores we achieved with Anna Freud in every new website we do going forward. Building on the tools and skills we brought to the delivery of the Anna Freud website, other charities will be able to benefit from quicker more secure websites.
There were significant enhancements to the design of the website too. A new information architecture reorganised Anna Freud’s numerous resources via topic as opposed to user group — people are now more likely to find the right, valuable content for them, rather than being confined to the content sitting under their audience area of the site. The redesigned website also made it easier for users to find Anna Freud’s ‘5 steps to mental health and wellbeing’ framework’ — a free, evidence-based framework to help teaching professionals develop a whole-school or college approach to mental health. This highly-valued resource was also redeveloped alongside the website to provide a technological foundation that could be continuously improved.
As the subtitle suggests, the website that launched last October was only the beginning — the foundations for what comes next.
At Reason Digital, our aim is to be the best long-term partner for our clients and a big part of that is ensuring a website is serving our client well now and well into the future. Through our continuous improvement offer, there is structure around how enhancements to the website are discussed, scoped, and planned in line with Anna Freud’s strategic plan. Work is currently underway scoping out new and exciting features, such as a new digital mental health intervention for young girls and women that encourages reflection, openness and community.
So, watch this space and be the first to find out what Anna Freud did next!