The Client
WaterAid is an international charity working to change the world through water. Founded in 1981, it focuses on making clean water and good hygiene normal for everyone, everywhere. WaterAid operates as a global federation, with country members from the UK and Sweden to Japan, India, and Bangladesh. Its websites help members reach supporters, share the stories behind the work, and raise the funds that keep it going.
The Situation
WaterAid needed a web presence that could tell its stories quickly and consistently in every market without soaking up the budget meant for its mission. The charity partnered with manifesto, a digital experience agency, to rethink how it built, ran, and edited its sites. Together they set six goals:
- One platform: Consolidate 22 separate country websites into a single, shared platform.
- One brand: Deliver a consistent brand experience across every federation member.
- Stories first: Give editors flexible tools to tell stories the way they want to tell them.
- Leaner operations: Reduce spending on redundant tools, workarounds, and site maintenance.
- Lighter footprint: Build accessible, lightweight pages that reflect WaterAid's commitment to the climate.
- Global reach: Support content in 11 languages and counting, from English to Japanese.
The Challenge
Too much of WaterAid's editorial time went into working around its websites. The charity ran 22 separate sites, one for each country member, and each had drifted in its own direction. They shared a similar feel, but none was fully consistent with the brand.
The problems ran deeper under the surface. Many components had been built for a previous brand and simply reskinned for the new one. Some sites ran version one of a component while others ran version two. Fields went unused, and editors had to find creative workarounds to get components to do what they needed.
Sharing work across the federation was slow and uncertain. To reuse a successful campaign, an editor had to log into another country's site, copy the content piece by piece, and hope it would look and behave the same once they added it to their own site. Rich storytelling lived in a separate third-party tool with its own login and licensing fees, so building a single campaign could mean juggling multiple tabs and systems. Teams often shaped their stories around what the tool could do rather than the stories they wanted to tell.
Search added to the strain. Each site relied on a basic database search that couldn't be cached, handled multiple character sets poorly, and put a costly load on the infrastructure.
For a charity, every hour and every license matters. Workarounds and lengthy processes took time away from higher-value work, and the fragmented setup relied on more tools than the charity needed. The opportunity was clear: simplify the estate so more of those resources could go to the people WaterAid exists to serve.
The Solution
WaterAid and Acquia partner, manifesto, started by deciding what not to fix. Rather than tackle every problem at once, they identified the few areas where change would deliver the most value and focused there.
Rebuilding the component library from the ground up
WaterAid's team had already mapped every component and template in use: where each appeared, how often, and how visitors interacted with it. manifesto took that data to editorial teams in Sweden, Japan, India, Bangladesh, and other countries to learn how each one used, adapted, and worked around those components. WaterAid's team embraced the scrutiny, ready to question every component rather than hold on to familiar ones. With that insight, the teams refined, replaced, and consolidated almost everything, cutting 21 rigid templates down to 9 flexible ones built around what editors across the federation need.
Bringing storytelling into the CMS
WaterAid replaced its third-party storytelling tool with native storytelling components available to every country site. The goal, as manifesto's Arjun Hahadevan put it, was "tailoring the system to those stories rather than the other way around." The new components use images purposefully, surfacing a speaker when their words appear rather than filling a page with full-width photos. Audio offers an intimate, lighter-weight alternative to video. Every component is built to be accessible, with sliders that work for keyboard users and animations that respect a visitor's reduced-motion settings. Lighter pages also mean lower carbon emissions, which matters for a charity whose communities are hit hardest by the climate crisis.
Consolidating onto one platform
manifesto built custom tools to migrate content from the old content types into the new, flexible ones, while WaterAid chose what to carry forward and what to leave behind. All 22 country sites moved onto a single instance of Acquia Cloud Platform. Its caching layers serve most requests without ever reaching the server, so the team didn't need to plan around traffic for the combined estate. Countries went live in phases, starting with the UK and a handful of smaller federation members, while routing rules at the edge sent each visitor to the old or new site based on their country.
The new platform draws on several Acquia capabilities:
- Acquia Search powered by SearchStax replaced database search with a single search server and separate indexes for each language, using language-specific tokenizers for character sets such as Japanese. It's fast enough that WaterAid now uses it to power localized listing pages too, from a Japanese events page to multilingual publications searchable in up to three languages.
- Acquia Cloud Platform hosts all 22 country sites in one place, with caching that absorbs traffic across the whole estate.
- Acquia CLI plugs into manifesto's GitHub Actions pipelines, turning deployments into a few lines of code without logging into the platform.
Acquia support stayed close throughout the rollout. An Acquia contact helped the team design the country-by-country routing for the phased launch, and direct channels to Acquia contacts gave the team a fast path for urgent escalations. When the team needed help, Acquia Support responded within an hour and pointed them to the right place.
The Results
WaterAid now runs its entire web presence, all 22 country sites, from one platform and one CMS, instead of maintaining 22 separate versions of it.
Simpler editing across the federation
Editors work in a single system with a shared library of 9 flexible templates, down from 21. A campaign that succeeds in one country can be copied and translated into another, rather than rebuilt from scratch. Because every site draws on the same components, there's no guesswork about how a page will look, behave, or meet accessibility standards. Editors can focus on the stories themselves.
Lower overhead
Bringing storytelling into the CMS removed the licensing fees for a separate third-party tool, along with the onboarding costs of training editors on multiple systems. With one platform to maintain instead of 22, more of WaterAid's time and money can go where the charity would rather spend it: on its mission.
A consistent brand everywhere
WaterAid's brand team now has a consistent experience across every country site, a shift early feedback singled out. Editorial teams have responded with excitement about what the new tools make possible, as they get up to speed on a significantly changed way of working.
Faster, more accessible pages
Acquia Search powered by SearchStax delivers fast results across 11 languages and powers localized listing pages that database search couldn't support. Lightweight, accessible components serve visitors on any device, in any language, with a smaller carbon footprint.
The consolidation gives WaterAid a foundation to build on. The charity and manifesto continue to identify new ways to make better use of its resources, so its teams can spend less time running websites and more time changing the world through water.