Collective

We’re a worker-owned agency that designs, builds and supports websites for organisations we believe in.

Our review of 2019

2019 was a good year for Agile Collective. We grew some more – with Dan, Liam and Andreia all becoming part of the family. Maria made it home from her 22,500km cycle, while Finn sailed away to the Mediterranean on his boat Kittiwake (and came back again too). And the climate emergency continued to be a big thing for all of us, with both Ian and Maria taking time out to get involved with Extinction Rebellion.

Left: Kittiwake in Sicily
Left: Kittiwake anchored in the lee of the Capo San Vito headland, Sicily. Right: Maria cycling through the desert

We went to Amsterdam for Drupalcon Europe, Paris for DotCSS and DotJS (you can read our blog post about those two here), and travelled far and wide across the UK for conferences and events. There was the Ethical Consumer conference, the ODI Summit, Tech for Good meetups, Meaning conference, Agency Hacker workshops, the Charity Comms Digital conference, the CoTech Annual Gathering, Culture Geek, Worker Co-op Weekend, Museums & Tech…  so many interesting things to learn and people to meet!

We weren’t just gadding about though. We launched new sites for Oxfam International, Freedom from Torture, Action Aid International, and a new version of the Code of Fundraising Practice for the Fundraising Regulator. And our busy support team resolved around 2,050 tickets, questions and new feature requests raised by you.

We worked on ourselves too. We re-organised internally into Circles and became fully Sociocratic, and gained certification as a Living Wage employer (setting our own baseline as the London Living Wage). In addition to adopting a sociocratic structure, we thought it was time our brand reflected our evolution! Undertaking a rebrand, getting to the heart of an organisation and what they do, is something we love – although a bit trickier when it involves self-reflection! We survived, and we launched a new brand identity back in June along with our very own decoupled website.

We started offering some new services in 2019 too, including accessibility reviews and training to help you make sure your site is WCAG 2.1 compliant, Design Sprints for prototyping new ideas and products, and consent-based decision-making workshops for better ...wait for it... decisions. Alongside our core design, development, support and marketing services, we’re looking forward to doing more of this work in 2020, and our Tech and Project Delivery Circles are busy working on new products and services to roll out this year – so watch this space.

What next? With Drupal 9 scheduled for release in June it’s going to be another landmark year for Drupal, and we’re looking forward to seeing what more this shiny new decade will bring.