Amnesty International UK: a new digital front door for human rights

Amnesty International UK's previous website had served the movement for more than a decade, but it no longer matched the scale or ambition of the organisation it represented.

We selected Torchbox and Wagtail CMS, to build a new digital front door, one that would make it far easier for people to understand our mission and take action, while giving the movement itself, our local groups, campaigns and research, the visibility it deserved.

A few months after launch, the homepage now scores 100 out of 100 on automated accessibility checks, up fourteen points on before, pages are 46% lighter and mobile load times are eleven seconds faster. Three quarters of users are getting good Core Web Vitals scores, which translates into a better experience for anyone using assistive technology or an older device.

Our Knowledge Hub has had over 112,000 users and more than 207,000 page views in its first few months, with time spent on resource pages roughly double what it was on the old site.

Press releases responding to breaking human rights news are reaching up to three times as many people, and our trust donation pages are converting at 15.7%, well ahead of the UK sector benchmark of around 12%. Here's how we got there.

This project sits within a much wider digital transformation programme at Amnesty, overseen by Elly Crump, our Head of Data, Digital and Technology Transformation, with a new CRM due in 2027 and a community platform for our local groups that launched earlier this year. Our previous site was more than a decade old, built on Drupal, and had grown into a huge volume of content that had become difficult to navigate. It wasn't always easy for people to understand who we are, what we do and how they could get involved, and because any meaningful change relied on specialist support from our web team, it limited how agile the rest of the organisation could be in maintaining the site day to day.

We also wanted the website to play a much bigger role in the core work of the organisation, campaigning, fundraising, movement building and public education, alongside goals around accessibility and reporter experience, and to sit comfortably alongside the other products that were part of this development, including the Knowledge Hub and a new supporter platform.

At a high level, this was about creating a new digital front door for Amnesty. We wanted a platform that could clearly explain our mission, make it easier for people to take action, donate and get involved, and help audiences who are new to Amnesty, or new to human rights altogether, build their understanding of the issues we work on, which is a large part of what the Knowledge Hub content is for.

Another important part of the brief was making sure the site reflected the diversity and energy of the Amnesty movement, giving far greater visibility to our hundreds of local groups, networks and community events, a sense of a dynamic, living movement that had been getting lost on the old site.

Moving from Drupal to Wagtail CMS was central to all of this, it meant shifting from a centralised publishing model, where teams relied heavily on the web team for any change, to one where people across the organisation could confidently manage their own content, with the right tools and training behind them. Dave and the team at Torchbox supported Wagtail training with Loom videos and documentation, which our web team expanded on, and the uptake of that training has been one of the quiet successes of the launch, with teams across Amnesty managing their own content well from very early on.

Overall traffic is down, which is true across much of the internet right now, but the traffic that remains is higher intent. We're seeing longer session durations, higher engagement rates and lower bounce rates than on the previous site, which tells us that even three months after launch, the redesign and the way we're presenting our content is working.

Accessibility was a priority from the start, so it was especially pleasing to see the homepage hit a perfect automated accessibility score so soon after launch, alongside much lighter pages and significantly faster mobile load times, a better experience for every user, but particularly those relying on assistive technology or working on slower devices.

The adoption of Wagtail has been just as encouraging, with teams across the organisation actively creating and managing their own content rather than routing every change through specialists.

The Knowledge Hub has been one of the standout results, as we didn't have anything like it before, so there's no direct comparison to make, but a review three months after launch showed over 100,000 users, more than 200,000 page views and 16,000 resource downloads, with equivalent resource journeys roughly doubling compared to the old site.

Internally, teams are telling us their audiences are finding feature resources, from education to activism resources, more easily, across quite different audience groups, which was the whole point of building the hub in the first place. There's still a lot to build out, particularly our introduction to human rights content for newer audiences, but the early signs are doing exactly what we hoped.

On donations, a lot of credit goes to colleagues who worked on the design with goDonate and Torchbox, simplifying the experience around sector best practice, cleaner layouts, clearer calls to action and a much better mobile experience, along with ‘donate’ prompts woven more naturally throughout the site. Not every page performed as well as we'd hoped straight out of the gate, so we went back to goDonate to simplify some of them further, and that iteration paid off, with our trust donation pages now converting above the sector benchmark, and non-paid traffic is converting at an even higher rate, which points to a real alignment between content, campaigns and the broader supporter journey.

The drop in overall traffic volume is partly the sector adjusting to AI overviews and AI agents, something we'd already seen coming but which has continued faster than expected, and it's emerged very quickly as a key priority. It isn't just SEO anymore, it's GEO too, and we're asking ourselves how we make sure Amnesty is one of the trusted sources when people turn to AI for answers.

Fortunately we already had a content strategy built around explainers and FAQs, so it's really about leaning further into that, formatting our introduction to human rights content in the right way and sharing it on the external channels we know AI tools lean on, like LinkedIn and Reddit.

Part of this is also about listening more closely, through search data, our comms team and social listening, to the questions people are actually asking, whether that's bigger picture questions from people exploring human rights for the first time or more detailed questions on topics like migrants’ rights,, or the kind of practical questions people raise in our workshops and forums, and making sure we have clear, trustworthy answers ready for them.

The website launch was one part of a much larger digital transformation programme, and a review a few months after going live helped us work out what to prioritise next, because the plans you make at the start of the year rarely match the picture once real usage data comes in.

Homepage engagement is a near-term focus. We designed it to be that proper front door, explaining who we are, what we do, our impact and the diversity of the movement, and it does a lot of that well, but engagement isn't quite where we want it to be, so that's something we're working through.

We're also mid-sprint with Torchbox on improving conversion on our petition and action pages, with fundraising and membership pages next in line, and on the editorial side we want to produce more of the explainer and timely response content that's become so important to how people find us through AI.

If I were talking to another charity considering a project like this, partly because of the wider transformation we're still in the middle of, I'd say don't think of it as just a website project. It's an organisational transformation project, and while the platform obviously matters, so do content strategy and governance, training, accessibility and who owns it internally once it's live.

Everyone across the organisation has a stake in it, and it can have a major impact on teams and objectives well beyond the web team, so it's worth approaching it that way from the start rather than letting it stay in its own silo.

The other thing I'd flag is that the digital landscape can shift quickly while you're still building - for example search behaviour, AI adoption, audience habits - so having a strong, flexible foundation, both technically and organisationally, matters more today than it ever has.

On working with Torchbox, I joined the project halfway through and was immediately struck by how well it was being managed. Dave and Claudia kept us on track throughout, and the project was delivered on time and on budget, with a small amount of outstanding development work folded into future sprints.

Torchbox also really understood our brand, not just the visual toolkit but what we're trying to represent as an organisation, and that came through clearly in the final designs, alongside real support on content strategy. Emily and her development team were fast and we felt completely in safe hands with them throughout.