Creating a user-friendly website to tell the story of LEAP

Phil Byrne, Digital Communications Officer at the Lambeth Early Action Partnership, explains how LEAP’s communications team designed a new and engaging website to tell the full story of the programme.

What is the best way to tell the story of a programme that lasted ten years, including all the important outcomes and learnings? That was the challenge for LEAP’s Communications Team as their work drew to a close in March 2025.

The team created the following website - The Story of LEAP - that let the audience decide where to hop on and off along the journey.

Back in 2020, long-hand reports were sitting idly on the old LEAP website. LEAP therefore began to look at new ways to present their impact on the outcomes for pregnant women, babies and children and their families.

Our research found that several organisations had produced interactive web pages to replace traditional annual reporting. Girls Who Code is a good example of this.

Creating engaging and accessible content

Further research uncovered problems with using the traditional PDF style reporting. For example, they don’t change size to fit the browser, and they’re not designed for phones or screens.

The GOV.UK website was one of the pioneers advocating for publishing content in HTML as webpages, not PDFs. Examples like this provided us with both the evidence and motivation to create a website that would bring LEAP’s learnings to life.

After putting the project out to tender, we chose to work with The Ideas Bureau. The specialist team builds websites for charities, non-profits and NGOs, and they know a thing or two about building scalable, accessible and interactive web pages.

The audience decides

The most important part of the process was making sure that we were designing something for our audience, not for us. With this in mind, we worked closely with our Community Engagement, and Research and Evaluation colleagues. Prototypes were sent out for audience members to comment on as we continued to refine our templates.

A good example of how we implemented this feedback was our rethinking of references in reports. We gave people the option to hover over the superscript number to see the reference there and then, instead of needing to click back and forth through the references section.

In the end we agreed on a main landing page, summarising the different strands of LEAP’s work, and a reports page of evaluations, learning journeys and expert analysis.

Structuring the site

The landing page deliberately fused copy, images, videos and pull-out quotes and stats to allow our audiences to quickly immerse themselves in the programme’s achievements. Colour-coded sections and keyworded headings helped users to dip in and out using the site’s smooth navigation feature. We wanted to make the experience as effortless as possible for people to find and discover evidence about the programme’s great impact.

We structured the reports page in the following way: a library page presented the series of reports, selecting one sends the user to a summary page, using keywords and highlighted learnings to pull people in. We nicknamed these pages ‘shop windows’ to emphasise the way people might browse before committing to engaging further. These pages linked to the full reports, and executive summaries, which used keyworded headings and a side-navigation bar to help the reader scan at ease.

Improving readability, not oversimplifying

There were challenges, of course. Primarily, there was a cultural shift that needed to happen. Colleagues were concerned about the new format lessening the authority of their communications. There was worry that content may be diluted to suit a less text-heavy presentation.

These were genuine concerns that we did not just want to cast aside. It was important that all teams were working together to create influential communications. A cursory search about writing for the web, immediately brings up results on using plain English and scannable copy. Readability guidelines stress the importance of using plain English even for highly literate audiences.

It’s not about oversimplifying copy. It is about:

• Using accessible language as much as possible
• Cutting words that don’t add anything to keep sentences short and active
• Explaining jargon
• Employing keywords that your audience will be searching for
• Summarising your main argument, who it’s aimed at and why it’s important right from the get-go
• Providing your unique insight and depth of argument that the audience can navigate down to.

In essence, it is vital to deliver your headline messages as plainly and efficiently as possible. Never hide your most compelling content. Of course, others will need the detail, which all persuasive content should aim to deliver in an accessible way.

It is also about respecting the audience’s time. Policy makers, influencers, practitioners and other key stakeholders all share one thing in common: they are busy individuals, some of whom will be part of our early-year family audiences.

Breaking these arguments down and working with colleagues to realise them was hugely satisfying. In addition, it made us all think more about how our various audiences would be interacting with the content.

It wasn’t a one-way street of learning. The communications team also listened to the arguments for allowing audiences to convert the reports into PDFs that they could download and print off. PDFs are particularly good for printing because they hold their layout/design. On reflection, we felt it was reasonable to present this as an option in the form of a clickable button.

Did we succeed?

Naturally, we were all interested in the results. Previously, our reports and programme pages had seen low engagement rates (some below 10%). They also had high bounce rates (some above 60%), which meant that audiences were only viewing the one page they landed on and then leaving.

We needed evidence that our content was relevant and with our new site, we got it. Success was people clicking on our pages, continuing their journey on our site and sticking around for enough time to show they were interested.

Using Google Analytics, we tracked key metrics that would establish how effective our changes had been. We saw advances in almost every area. Our engagement rate has soared to above 50%. Our bounce rate dropped below 40% for the main landing page, and as low as less than 10% for the shop window pages.

One of the most pleasing aspects was that people were obviously interacting with our shop-window pages, which make up most of the most popular pages on the website. This justified our decision to create entry points into the more in-depth reports.

Leaving a legacy

The website was originally named, The Story So Far. In recent months we have transitioned it to reflect the planned end of the 10-year programme.

The Story of LEAP gives a complete overview of what we learnt and achieved. We made sure to archive any content that would otherwise need updating, including time-copyrighted videos, and annually reported stats. We updated the presentation of each strand by including a gallery of the different services they offered, and an overview of the related reports. These reports linked to their respective shop-window presentations.

The National Children’s Bureau will now look after the website while it remains online for the next two years. We hope that it continues to inspire and influence audiences across the early years sector.

About A Better Start

A Better Start is a ten-year (2015-2025), £215 million programme set-up by The National Lottery Community Fund, the largest funder of community activity in the UK.

Five A Better Start partnerships based in Blackpool, Bradford, Lambeth, Nottingham and Southend are supporting families to give their babies and very young children the best possible start in life. Working with local parents, the A Better Start partnerships are developing and testing ways to improve their children’s diet and nutrition, social and emotional development, and speech, language and communication.

The work of the programme is grounded in scientific evidence and research. A Better Start is place-based and enabling systems change. It aims to improve the way that organisations work together and with families to shift attitudes and spending towards preventing problems that can start in early life. It is one of five major programmes set up by The National Lottery Community Fund to test and learn from new approaches to designing services which aim to make people’s lives healthier and happier

The National Children’s Bureau is coordinating an ambitious programme of shared learning for A Better Start, disseminating the partnerships’ experiences in creating innovative services far and wide, so that others working in early childhood development or place-based systems change can benefit.

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Visit the A Better Start website to find out more.