Image of a man raising finds for a charity

Fundraising Regulator

After the initial launch of the Fundraising Regulator in 2016, its success and growth quickly overwhelmed the site’s capacity to successfully deliver online services.

Content on the old site was poorly organised and visually inconsistent, especially across the parts of the site that were hosted on different domains. Key features of the website were dependent upon third-party suppliers and it was impossible for FR staff to make improvements to registration forms and processes. The addition of a self-service area of the website for re-registration and payment by members of the levy had also become a high priority, helping to reduce costs and increase revenue.

https://www.fundraisingregulator.org.uk
    Image of the Fundraising Regulator's home page

    Discovery & research

    Working closely with our regular content strategy partners, Contentious, we ran workshops with key stakeholders and interviewed fundraising professionals from large, medium, and small charities. Combining these shared experiences with insights from a website user survey, we identified the most important user journeys for the new website.

    With a hard deadline for launch, we needed a carefully coordinated delivery plan across three parallel strands of work: content auditing and rewriting; website UX and visual design; and technical re-architecting and integration with third-party systems.

    Applying our agile delivery process we incrementally improved and consolidated a convoluted legacy technical infrastructure enabling FR staff to take control of their online business processes, and transferred knowledge to the client’s internal technical team to ensure that they could, if necessary, recreate the website from scratch themselves.

    Fundraising Regulator homepage on a tablet

    The new website

    We created a simplified and streamlined information architecture for the new website providing clear signposting from the homepage to the most relevant content for each audience, and with design collaborator (and fellow CoTech member) Wave, delivered a clean, accessible design with bold use of iconography and a typographical treatment optimised for readability.

    The new website is powered by Drupal 8 and integrated with Form Assembly and Salesforce CRM with a stylistically consistent and coherent user experience across these disparate systems and the previously separate Public Register and charity pages.

    Improved search and filtering of charities in the Public Register has also been delivered as part of the Drupal integration work and member charities can now update and control the information displayed in the Public Register from a password-protected area of the website.

    Categorisation of content in Drupal by fundraising topic allows editors to easily associate related publications, resources, case studies, sections of the Code of Fundraising practice, news and other content. And by implementing Paragraphs, we ensured that editors would have plenty of flexibility when creating new ad hoc content types.

    Registration page on a mobile screen
    Complaints page on a mobile screen

    Main image (top): Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

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