Collective

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

Child poverty action group logo

Child Poverty Action Group

The Agile Collective team has built a strong working relationship with Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG), and what started as a simple Drupal upgrade has become a lasting partnership. Together, we’ve delivered incredible results while providing challenging and fulfilling work for our project team, James, Maria, Richard, and Steph.

https://cpag.org.uk/

Who are CPAG?

Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) is a UK-based charity that works with welfare rights advisors in the UK. Their mission is to eliminate child poverty.

They provide welfare rights advisors with information and training services to help them better support their service users.

The brief

CPAG came to us with a detailed brief for a Drupal upgrade and minor design changes. 

While we could deliver the project as defined, we could see that it wouldn’t provide precisely what CPAG needed for their users. 

We agreed to take a step back and run a stand-alone discovery and design phase. 

Pleased with the process and enthusiastic about what could be achieved, the CPAG team worked with us to create a new brief, including improving the information architecture, complex integration and a new look and feel.

The outstanding feature of this project is that it’s developed into a good long-term partnership with a strong product owner. They were a great client team, which allowed us to be a great project team.

Steph smiling
Stephanie Lenz
Visual Designer, Agile Collective

Discovery phase

We began by running a Theory of Change workshop facilitated by Richard. This helped ensure that the project team (across both organisations) understood the project's aims and objectives.

These were: 

  • to replace the outdated Drupal 7 site
  • replicate all the existing integrations (single sign-on, Sugar, Libro, and Moodle)
  • Improve the editorial experience for site managers
  • improve user journeys through the site
  • make the website more accessible

As part of the process it became clear that CPAG needed more than the simple Drupal upgrade that was initially requested. This had a significant impact on our work in the definition phase.

Understanding user needs

During the discovery phase, we mapped out user groups and conducted user interviews and testing to understand: 

  • how users seek information
  • how they used the site
  • how they might like to do so in the future

We found a clear hierarchy of users, with welfare rights advisors at the top. They are looking for very specific information in the benefits welfare rights handbook.

These users often return to the CPAG site as they see it as a trusted source of information. 

Other users included benefit claimants (specifically in Scotland) and policy advisors, who also had to be catered for on the site. The navigation was complex for these users, so we worked hard to simplify and restructure the content and navigation. 

The definition phase 

Based on the discovery phase and user research, the definition phase looked at what we needed to change on the site.

There were challenges identified to improve the UX, especially regarding integrations. 

The best way forward was to redesign the navigation and improve the visual design and theme.

We aimed to:

  1. Improve the look, feel, accessibility and UX of the site
  2. Better integrate a part of the site hosted on a different platform
  3. Cater for an additional distinct audience in Scotland
  4. Improve the e-commerce flow
  5. Update sign-on and integration with the membership database

Accessibility

During this phase, we also ran accessibility workshops to ensure that the project team was on the same page and that accessibility was core to the project.

It was powerful running the accessibility workshop then. After this, I didn’t need to explain anything to them again about the importance of accessibility. They were very much on board. They would ask me questions about the way to do things, but they took accessibility very seriously and applied it wherever it was necessary.

A pic of Maria looking very dreamy
Maria Young
Accessibility Lead,  Agile Collective

The solutions

Design

We wanted to stick with the basic page types but improve how they looked (by better matching the brand), the accessibility and UX.

Steph created mood boards and mapped prototypes with new typography, layout, colour scheme, and branding.

We then reviewed each with the CPAG team and decided on a final design.

Steph created wireframes that included new paragraph types (to help content editors adhere to brand guidelines and have simple, easy-to-use standard layouts).

The new brand is fresh and clean, and the UX changes help users quickly find what they are looking for and navigate the site. 

We renamed the “Ask CPAG” area of the site to “Welfare Rights” and used it to create a repository for all the content specifically for Welfare Rights Advisors. This part of the site has its own IA and a slightly different look and feel than the rest, almost like a subsite.

We created a new navigation for those interested in policy and research on child poverty.

CPAG homepage on a mobile phone
CPAG homepage on a laptop screen
CPAG: univeral credit tools and templates page in a tablet computer

This project was successful because the client was user-focused and appreciated our design and thinking. The product owner always makes requests from a user's point of view. They're good empathisers, making working with them a joy.

Steph smiling
Steph Lenz
Lead Designer, Agile Collective

Integrations

CPAG required several interesting integrations between their website, CRM, Moodle (for online courses) and another publishing platform called Libros. 

  • Sign-on update

James updated the sign-on functionality to integrate the latest version of Drupal with the membership database hosted in SUGAR CRM (a platform that helps businesses manage customer interactions across marketing, sales, and customer service teams).

There was a compatibility issue with the latest version of PHP so we had to upgrade the system, this was a technical challenge. To do this, James looked at the latest work in the open source community and used this as a basis for his fix to create a new release.

  • Better integrate the LIBROS 

CPAG provides many resources for users; some are free to all users, and some are only available to members. Previously both were served through a separate site, that was not well integrated into the CPAG site.

The sign-on work enabled further improvement of the user experience around the Librios integration. 

This included migrating most free content from the Librios platforms to the Drupal 10 site. 

The Libros platform then became an area for logged-in users to access paid-for content, styled slightly differently but within the new branding guidelines.

One of the technical challenges here was implementing an authentication process to access the content. James did this using a protocol called SAML. There was no SAML release for the latest version of Drupal, so additional work was needed to ensure it was compatible with the latest version of PHP. 

Moving free content onto the main site allowed James to create novel Welfare rights search functionality using SOLR. This complex work needed to include bespoke search terms for specialist content.

  • Improving e-commerce

We moved CPAG onto the latest version of commerce that has new features and improved how people buy tickets. It’s now a more streamlined and simplified checkout experience to find and add tickets to your chart, without having to add lots of information at the point of choosing.

Conclusion

What started as a simple Drupal update has become a long-term partnership. We now support the site and recently worked with the CPAG team to improve their email campaigns. We are also making iterative changes to the site, such as improving the training section and resource library.

Back to projects