The Trussell Trust
Taking the fight against food poverty online with a website for The Trussell Trust and (almost) every food bank in the UK
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.
We created a website cloning system so that The Trussell Trust can quickly create and manage new foodbank websites. The charity’s local foodbank teams now have the ability to effortlessly make and update multiple local sites.
The results
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.
80% decrease in hosting costs thanks to new technology choices
50% of foodbanks have deployed their own local site
Why this matters?
The demand for foodbanks is growing at an unprecedented rate: around 347,000 people received at least three days’ emergency food in 2012-2013 and three new foodbanks open each week in the UK.
Each new foodbank needs a website in order to effectively promote its services and to receive support and donations; creating an increasing burden on communications staff who had to manually manage each site.
Trussell Trust needed to be able to replicate new local websites with ease and convert sufficient numbers of visitors into supporters.
A national challenge
The demand for foodbanks is growing at an unprecedented rate: around 347,000 people received at least three days’ emergency food in 2012-2013 and three new foodbanks open each week in the UK.
Each new foodbank needs a website in order to effectively promote its services and to receive support and donations; creating an increasing burden on communications staff who had to manually manage each site.
Trussell Trust needed to be able to replicate new local websites with ease and convert sufficient numbers of visitors into supporters.
"Thrilled to hear that many #Foodbanks love the new website!"
From discovery to delivery
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.
"One thing I can definitely say is that moving to Wordpress saved us money on hosting. We’re paying 80% less than we did last year."