Bringing grant-making impact to life with stories and data visualisation

We were really excited to design and build the Wagtail-powered website for the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF). The new website is a key element in CIFF’s drive for greater transparency in grant making, and to share what they and their partners are learning.

The centrepiece is the grant portfolio, an interactive visualisation of live grant data. It allows site visitors to browse grants via a dynamic set of bar charts representing grants by priority area, topic, and region – and then access the full detail about any particular grant.

This live view across themes and geographies – previously unavailable, even to CIFF staff – is a really clear way to visualise the very large numbers involved. We focussed on keeping the interface simple and responsive across all devices from desktop to mobile. Of course, there’s a standard filterable listing available if you want to be more selective (want to see nutrition grants in Africa? Education grants in South Asia?)

The site is also one of the first outings for Wagtail’s StreamField feature. StreamField is used on the “insight” pages to give a rich, flexible content layout for CIFF’s editors to tell the story of what they’re learning from key programmes, and bring the data to life.

As with the majority of our projects we’re using Google Analytics – in this case, to report on how people are using the grant portfolio and on the range of on-site conversions such as signing up to email, viewing key pages and documents, sharing content or following key staff on social media.

After launch, sessions were up by 50%, bounce rate down by 7%, and average duration up 15% - a more engaged audience, with increased conversion rate for all goals.

With a client so focussed on data and evidence for their grantmaking work, it goes without saying that we'll be using the analytics to continue to enhance the site over time.