The Public Fundraising Regulatory Association is the charity-led membership body that self-regulates all forms of direct debit face-to-face fundraising. Following a strategy and positioning review, we were commissioned to design and build a new website to better reflect PFRA's regulatory role as the bridge between charities and local authorities.

The PFRA has different stakeholder with different expectations. Previous incarnations of the PFRA website had lost consistency of message because they were saying different things to different people.

As such, the first challenge of this project was to work with the PFRA team to develop an information architecture that allows users to navigate according to the information they need, not who they are.

Once the site structure was agreed, our iterative creative design process delivered a user-centred design for the site that makes the content easily navigable and provides an engaging online experience for the key stakeholders.

Providing a facility for the PFRA editorial team to easily publish and manage their content was also key to the success of the project. We chose the open source content management system ExpressionEngine and took advantage of the in built system of content channels and templates to provide custom publishing options for all the required content types.

We also extended the basic system with carefully selected plug-ins from the hundreds provided by the active ExpressionEngine community. These extra features allowed us to create a simple administration interface where the content authors can easily tailor each page so that relevant links to files, internal and external pages can be shown.

The end result is a fully functional website that engenders trust and confidence in PFRA as a trustworthy source of information; delivers the information that charities and local authorities require and is accessible to any members of the public who visit.

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