Trussell

The Client

Trussell supports a network of over 1,200 food banks to provide emergency food and tackle poverty. The organization works with food banks across the UK to provide emergency food to people in crisis and campaign for change to end the need for food banks.

The Situation

Trussell needed to replace its legacy CMS with a scalable platform featuring a personalized multi-site experience for 432 food banks. The organization receives over £3.4m in online cash donations annually and needed an intuitive donation funnel to increase this figure. 

Additionally, Trussell needed to improve the user journey for people in crisis seeking emergency food support and unify content management for hundreds of food banks operating on fragmented systems. Accessibility and inclusivity were cornerstone objectives for the project.

The Challenge

Trussell faced numerous challenges on its journey to optimize its digital experience:

Decentralized content management: Food banks previously relied on fragmented systems with no unified standards. Migrating them to a single platform required detailed stakeholder alignment and extensive training to ensure adoption.

Legacy infrastructure: The outdated CMS was unstable and lacked the scalability required for Trussell Trust's growth. To reduce system downtime, the organization needed to transition to a more scalable platform.

Data and mobile accessibility: Users often accessed the site on limited data plans. This required extensive testing to ensure that journeys were efficient, with steps optimized to use minimal data.

Donation optimization: The organization needed to create a state-of-the-art donation funnel that integrated multiple systems while ensuring smooth user experiences.

Stakeholder engagement and management: Trussell is a highly consultative organization that requires engagement with food banks throughout the process to ensure the editorial experience meets their needs.

The Solution

manifesto, a digital agency and Acquia partner, partnered with Trussell to rebuild its website using Acquia Cloud Platform. The key steps included:

Centralized content management: Using Acquia and Drupal, manifesto unified content management for 432 food banks, reducing time spent managing the site across the network. Customizable microsite templates enabled food banks to share their unique local stories while maintaining brand consistency.

Decoupled architecture: By leveraging Drupal for back-end content management and Next.js for the front end, the team delivered a platform optimized for scalability, performance, and flexibility. The system is robust enough to handle traffic during peak campaigns, ensuring high availability.

Donation funnel: The team redesigned the donation funnel with mobile-first features, including payment integration, regular giving nudges, and donation fee coverage options. A custom-built dashboard tracks live data to optimize future campaigns.

Unified design system: A React-based component library ensured consistent visuals and behaviors across the platform. Using Storybook for component development improved collaboration among remote teams, increasing the charity’s efficiency.

Data integration: The platform syncs real-time updates from Trussell's internal data systems, ensuring users always have accurate contact details, opening hours, and referral information for food banks.

Accessibility and inclusivity: The team embedded accessibility at every stage — from design to deployment — ensuring Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) AA compliance. They optimized the website for low-data usage, consuming less data to support users on limited mobile plans.

Designing for people in crisis: The team implemented specific design elements for people in crisis:

• Removed all other page elements when entering a focus journey
• Supportive interventions within key moments of the journey to reassure
• Stepped journeys to avoid overwhelming users
• Guiding and wayfinding throughout
• Real stories to show people they are not alone

The Results

The project achieved significant results across multiple areas:

Improved donation conversion: All pages are converting users better across numerous actions. The winter landing page converted users to donations at an impressive 52%. The number of total users to the site donating increased from 1.7% to 3.2% from November to the end of December.

When comparing overall conversion rates:

• All traffic: New site: 1.49%, Old site: 0.87%, Variance: +71.26%
• Organic traffic (all pages): New site: 0.37%, Old site: 0.35%, Variance: +5.71%
• Homepage traffic (all channels): New site: 1.29%, Old site: 1.16%, Variance: +10.71%

Perfect accessibility: The average across the site is 100/100 based on a Lighthouse score.

Positive user feedback: Food banks using the site have already seen benefits and received positive feedback from the people it's designed to support. As one Southend Food Bank Manager noted, "I've had some really positive feedback already from users on the emergency food journey, which makes it all worth it."

Unified content management: The 432 food banks now operate on a centralized platform, allowing them to spend less time managing their websites and more time supporting people in crisis.

Reduced system downtime: Transitioning to Acquia's scalable platform reduced system downtime to virtually zero post-launch.

As Meredith Sneddon, Head of Digital at Trussell, shared, "Our new digital platforms have already had a positive impact on our work, not only is it helping us reach and support people facing hardship in the UK, but we're able to better engage and mobilize our supporters and are seeing significantly higher year on year donation and conversion rates to help us achieve our vision to end the need for food banks. More people are able to find and get support from their local food bank, and food banks themselves now have the platforms and flexibility to better connect with their communities."