Building a digital movement to end the need for food banks

Challenge

Born out of the need for the provision of emergency food in the UK, Trussell launched with a single food bank in Salisbury in 2000.

Now a network of more than 1,400 food banks across the UK, the anti-poverty charity provided more than 1.4 million emergency food parcels within just six months in 2024 – 69% higher than the same period five years ago.

Trussell’s mission is to challenge the structural economic issues that lock people in poverty, and mobilise the public to change attitudes and influence policy.

Its website plays a key role in how people access support from their local food banks, as well as being a critical vehicle for donations and support.

However, with demand for emergency food provision soaring, it needed a strategic digital partner to deliver a long-term plan that will drive more impact, reach, awareness and engagement, to help it realise its vision of ending the need for food banks within the next five years. 

The first requirement for our digital partnership was to design and build the new Trussell website, replacing an unstable legacy CMS system with a modern tech infrastructure built for short and long term needs. We also needed to design a hardworking multi-site experience to give a local, personalised presence to 432 of Trussell’s food banks. 

Solution

Our emphasis has been on creating a digital platform to bring the organisation’s new brand to life and make it easier for supporters to take action. This includes an increased emphasis on storytelling, an enhanced donation journey and crucially, an improved experience for people seeking emergency food. 

We worked with the Trussell team and people with lived experience of accessing food banks to transform this journey, reducing friction and increasing accessibility to a supportive, step-by-step journey for people in crisis. We built consensus through extensive user research, testing designs with lived experience audiences to design a compassionate, and fully accessible user experience.

Delivering a consistent but flexible experience for local food banks

Trussell’s community of more than 1,400 food banks play a crucial role in delivering the emergency food journey and we worked closely with them to co-design a new experience that integrates with the main Trussell website, giving each food bank its own website that supports the needs of people seeking support whilst giving food banks flexibility to tell their stories and promote their unique local services.

To create consistency whilst giving flexibility, we created a website starter kit that requires minimum input from the food banks, for them to provide the key online  journeys for their sites. Elements of the journeys that are crucial to delivering a good experience are locked down but can be built on and enhanced by those food banks who have the desire and capacity to do so. And the new templates provide the flexibility for the food banks to bring their creativity and unique content where this can add the most value to the users.

Test and learn donation journey

Donations were a key area for improvement, with more than £3.4 million of cash donations coming through Trussell’s donation funnel each year.

We designed and built a bespoke, intuitive donation funnel, which follows best practice and integrates mobile payment alongside a series of new components, such as regular giving nudges and donation fee coverage. This will support an ongoing conversion rate optimisation programme using our proprietary framework to design and implement tests that will increase conversion, value and ongoing engagement.  

Through our ongoing partnership we will track these results and optimise the journey over time.

A compelling and accessible design direction

We developed a design direction for the sites to bring Trussell’s new brand to life through the digital experience, creating a pattern library breaking down designs into component building blocks. 

We worked collaboratively with the branding agency throughout every stage of the process. By working as a team with shared goals we were able to ensure that what we create now is future-proofed and supports the rebrand workstream. 

We set high accessibility standards to be measured and checked at every stage of design, and challenged ourselves to create a journey that used as little data as possible to keep the journey accessible for people on lower incomes.

Our design team has stayed true to the new brand whilst adapting elements to meet the needs of digital channels, holding up accessibility standards with zero compromise, and addressing design feedback from user testing.

Impact 

The new online journey for emergency food services has received great feedback from the food banks and users. 

Broadly though, this has led to a change in how Trussell communicates with its audiences. Throughout the project we maintained a focus on transforming the way people access emergency food, as the key purpose of our work. To do this we shared insights with Trussell that go beyond website development, looking closer at improving their offline processes and ways of working to create more meaningful and impactful interactions with their audiences, especially beneficiaries. 

As part of our ongoing partnership, a programme of continuous improvement is in place to optimise the website and user experiences, including a bespoke data dashboard that continues to provide insights and highlight opportunities. 

The launch of the new website is just the beginning of a process that is supporting Trussell's vision of ending the need for food banks. As they move into a new three year strategy, we are working alongside them to identify how digital can support their strategic goals through innovation, audience segmentation and tech powered supporter journeys.