The challenge
The RSPCA – the world’s oldest animal-welfare charity – had grown to more than 1,600 staff and over £100 million in annual donations but its legacy technology could not keep pace. The organisation faced three primary hurdles:
- Limited business agility: Its existing content management system (CMS) slowed everything down. The IT team couldn’t respond quickly to new business requirements, and campaign development took months instead of weeks.
- Poor stakeholder collaboration: One-way communication channels failed to engage its 500,000-strong donor base and offered no real tools for collaboration between staff and the charity’s large network of volunteer-run branches.
- Digital experience (DX) issues: The public-facing website felt outdated. User journeys suffered, engagement dipped, and fundraising potential shrank. The charity urgently needed responsive design to support fast-growing mobile traffic.
Resolution and implementation strategy
The RSPCA adopted Liferay as the foundation for a phased digital-transformation programme, choosing it for its integration strength, user-experience components, and extensibility.
Phase one modernised the public website. The team used the platform’s rich UX features and integration tools to create several microsites for different business units. These units could now set up and manage their own campaigns with ease, generating local content that fed directly into the main site, increasing visibility and value.
This work established a central platform that supported iterative, continuous development, enabling each new feature to build on the last.
Phase two added new features month by month. After the upgrades, the entire website – including all microsites – became fully responsive across desktop, tablet and mobile. Within a year, more than half of all visits came from mobile devices, transforming accessibility and boosting engagement.
Phase three built a brand extranet system. Branches now use it to manage data on the animals in their care and produce their own microsite content.
How the project added value
The transformation delivered clear, measurable gains in both delivery and operational performance:
- Faster time-to-market: Development cycles for new features dropped from months to days, sharply reducing development costs.
- Greater agility: Business units can now respond instantly to new campaign requirements, improving income generation through faster awareness efforts and donation drives.
- Higher engagement: Improved collaboration between HQ, staff and branches strengthened site management and deepened relationships with supporters.
- Future scope: The next major extension is the ‘My RSPCA’ supporter portal, which will introduce user-generated content, forums and secure communication channels to enhance public engagement among thousands of registered users.
