The Rivers Trust
A map of every sewage overflow in the country.
The Rivers Trust is the umbrella body for sixty-five member trusts across the UK and Ireland. Their problem was never that people disagreed about the state of the rivers. It was that most people had no idea how bad it had got.
Making the scale of it visible
The charity already had the data. Turning it into something a person could feel took a map: every sewage overflow in the country, plotted, searchable, and hard to argue with.
Alongside it sat the State of the Rivers report, with the headline findings readable by anyone and the detail underneath for people who wanted it. After launch, both were picked up by national television and press, which is a rare outcome for a charity website and precisely what it was built to do.
Sixty-five trusts, one website
The Rivers Trust speaks for a network, not just for itself, and the site had to give that network somewhere to stand.
A map you can’t argue with
Every sewage overflow in the country, plotted from the charity’s own data, so the scale of it is something you look at rather than something you are told.
One page, several depths
Content is layered from a headline anyone can take in through to the full report underneath it, so the same page serves a supporter and a journalist.
Sixty-five trusts, one platform
Every member trust in the network gets space for its own news, events and job vacancies, instead of routing all of it through head office.
Supporters you can follow up
A CRM integration, so somebody who acts on the site becomes somebody the charity can actually talk to afterwards.
A brand that had only ever existed offline
The identity came from another agency and had never had to work on a screen. Stretching it to hold a data visualisation, a long-form report and sixty-five member trusts’ worth of news was a fair chunk of the front-end work.
What I did
Another Kind project. The user research, the testing and the design were the team’s work, and the CRM integration was a colleague’s. I was handed a static design file, and the content model and the front end were mine from there.
Getting a data visualisation, a long-form report and sixty-five trusts’ worth of news to sit inside one mobile-first, responsive system was most of the job, and a performance budget matters when the audience is arriving from a news story on a phone. Semantics and accessibility were built in as the templates were written rather than audited in afterwards, which counts for more than usual when the entire point of the site is that anyone should be able to understand the state of their local river.
