Centralised Donor Management Platform across all charity property.

The challenge

Parkinsons UK consists of several hundred local branches across the UK and Northern Ireland, all with varied initiatives and processes, some had their own websites, donation platforms and connections to event platforms.

Branches with their own Websites relied heavily on third-party developers for all maintenance including any changes, this incurred upfront costs, whilst also posing wider risks to security, compliance and a significant cost-barrier to scale the organisation.

Some Branches utilised donation platforms, however since the rates and fees had not negotiated competitively at scale, they were uncompetitive, and many lacked popular pay-monthly options for donors. Branches managing donation platforms in insolation created regulatory, GDPR and compliance concerns which the team were keen to solve as part of the project.

Parkinsons UK needed to ensure they could provide all branches a standard framework, allowing teams to easily make content changes to their sites, and then train others to be self-sufficient, this would improve brand and domain consistency as changes could be delivered far more easily as needed as brand needs evolved.

A challenge shared by local groups and HQ was managing and distributing event information across their branches and different websites. The system relied on manual updates with messaging being the only medium to promote attendance from branches to head office, and vice versa.

Keen to optimise organisational efficiency, the team reached out to Cygnet to find a solution in 2022.

The Solution is the “Federated Headless Frontend”

Cygnet pioneered a first of its kind build, a new framework that could be duplicated at scale, called the “Federated Headless frontend”, it consists of an app capable of hosting and sharing site design and architecture across an unlimited number of websites from one central framework.

The Federated Headless Model allows multiple instances of the same website to be distributed from one codebase. Centralising and simplifying content and brand changes, minimises the complexity for organisations as websites can be changed and updated from a standardised content and branding framework. This offers users Flexibility and reduces change costs, lowering total cost of ownership and reducing reliance on third party contractors and agencies to deliver simple changes to frontend sites. Since the architecture for the Federated headless frontend is considered “Stateless” meaning it has no specific digital location to target, made it nearly impossible for sites to be compromised, defaced or have key information changes that might impact the brand of the security of any branches site.

The key win for PUK was to make onboarding and launching a branch website simple and managed by the internal team. Under the previous setup, a site build could take weeks and would only be able to be used once for that particular membership group. The Federated headless model made it possible for a new website to be set up and distributed to the team that needed it within a few hours within a scalable and repeatable model at low cost. The model removed the requirement to bespoke build each site, since the architecture could be easily duplicated and are easy to amend and change.

Cygnet trained Parkinson's UK’s teams on how to own their sites and content to ensure they could succeed self-sufficiently, Parkinsons then encouraged teams to teach other colleagues and supporters to reduce ownership costs. Since brand guidelines were integrated into the Federated Headless model, these could be easily duplicated at scale for each branch, now with the skills to populate with their own content, initiatives and events themselves.

Cygnet built a scalable cost-efficient PWA (Progressive Web App) that could be easily changed by each branch and their teams. Built in Next.JS, the app was deployed to all branches and standardised the tech stack, reducing the need for isolated changes previously carried out by external consultants and third parties.

Standardising the stack framework across all branches also solved the problem of domain consistency, which had caused confusion across the organisation. Domains could now be standardised and managed centrally, due to the standardised nature when creating.

The Federated Headless Model integrated all branches' websites to a centralised events platform via API, this allowed Parkinson's UK central team to have oversight on all regional events, enabling better promotion and awareness, similarly local groups had visibility of national events near them, whereas before all data had to be manually entered, updated and shared, this could be automatically added to the branch websites, and more easily distributed to supporters.

To solve the regulatory, security and compliance issues of branches using multiple donation platforms and bank accounts, Cygnet integrated partners Everfund into the stack, offering a reduction in chargeable fees for Parkinsons across all of their donations, with a fully compliant highest impact. Standardising the frameworks of donation handling, payments of funds and processes ensured that the highest levels of compliance were met.

From Parkinson's UK’s Federated headless app, administrators and users could now make design changes to their sites easily at lower cost, easily integrate event information to their sites where relevant and had solved the challenges around security, donation management and compliance.

Aligning national and regional branches, boosting event awareness and attendance by X and improving the internal communication and efficiency between all national branches.

“We knew that we had our work cut out for us and this required something new. The federated headless frontend offers sustainable routes forward for other charities who faced the same challenges. The result was the Federated Headless Model” Peter Ross CEO Cygnet.

On the Project: “The challenges we faced on this project caused us to take a step back to evaluate how charities manage websites en mass. The Federated headless model allows us to onboard and scale sites in the most cost effective way for our customers”

On the Best of Breed approach “We looked at a huge number of CMS partners, and off the shelf systems, we quickly realised that we would need to build something totally different in order to meet the charities key objectives. Peter Ross, CEO Cygnet.IO.