LEAP - The Idea Bureau

Introduction

LEAP (Lambeth Early Action Partnership) is an early-years service created by the National Children’s Bureau in 2015. It was funded by The National Lottery Community Fund and intended to run for 10 years – as such, it’s coming to the end of its life. Formed off the back of the work that Sure Start and local Children’s Centres programmes did for the Lambeth area, the programme organisers are made up of parents, early years practitioners, nurseries, children’s centres, Lambeth Council, NHS trusts, community organisations and local charities.

Its goal was to provide children aged 0-3, their families (parents and carers), and early-years practitioners with services to assist in improving children’s development, particularly for those from disadvantaged areas, including: social and emotional development, communication and language, diet and nutrition, and opportunities to engage in the community. LEAP’s legacy is to continue to signpost events and services to families to continue the work that the programme provided.

The Problem

We’ve previously worked with the National Children’s Bureau and were invited to submit a proposal to work on the LEAP retrospective website project. We were successful in our bid, and began to work with the team 6 years into their 10 year programme, helping them to communicate what the organisation had achieved over that time, and to look toward what the future holds.

The LEAP team wanted to try something new to make reporting on their work more immersive than a generic PDF report. They also wanted to make it more accessible and available for people to engage with online. Their current website is built using Pyro, a very tricky CMS (content management system) for non-technically minded people. Because of this, they required the new editor to be intuitive for all users, as well as combining different forms of content – for example: video, images and stats – to make the resulting report a visually appealing interactive experience.

“Tash and Ben at The Idea Bureau are fantastic to work with. They designed and built a new interactive template within LEAP’s “Story so Far” website for our first Annual Learning report. Offering us strategic advice, as well as their considerable technical expertise, they were creative in finding solutions to challenges and collaborative in their approach.”

Lynne Stockbridge

Communications Manager at LEAP

Our Solution

The website build took place over a couple of months, with further features being added ad hoc later on, as the project scope evolved over time. Initially, we collaborated with the team in discovery workshops to outline their exact requirements, giving advice to inform the project’s strategy, and provide technical solutions. Later, we held training sessions to empower the team to manage both their existing and new content. Both this training and the robust reporting tooling we’ve implemented has allowed them to create new reports quickly, easily and independently.

Client:: LEAP – Lambeth Early Action Partnership
Project Type:: Website Design & Build
Link:: story-of-leap.leaplambeth.org.uk
Tags:: Workshops, UI, UX, Development

How the website works

The original LEAP website was built upon a CMS that many users find difficult to use. As such, it was imperative that the new CMS would be easily grasped by its users to allow them to create content autonomously.

This new version of the site has given the LEAP team the ability to celebrate their successes – we’ve achieved this through using a variety of colours that tie in with the LEAP brand, delineating the various content elements, such as video, text and image galleries. These elements then bring to life their beautiful imagery, positive quotes from their users, and thoughtfully designed stats that demonstrate the impact they’ve had on the community.

The website build relies heavily on WordPress, and the Gutenberg editor, which allows us to build near-unlimited pages, with many purposefully built blocks. We typically underpin our WordPress builds with an open-source tool called Lumberjack, as this provides us with a solid technical foundation for the project, including structure and best coding practices.

Working together

It’s been such a pleasure to work with the LEAP team. We began the project by holding a basic workshop with them to discover the types of content they wanted to highlight; the workshop also gave us an opportunity to gain an understanding of the successes of the LEAP project, and how best we could celebrate these. Later, we provided extensive training to enable them to manage all of their content independently, especially with the more complex reports section of the website.

“We’ve had lots of positive feedback about this important research, and the way a quite lengthy report has been made accessible and easy to navigate.”

Lynne Stockbridge

Communications Manager at LEAP

Creating a robust reporting functionality

Implementing a new reporting functionality is a challenge, as it’s quite a complicated topic for anyone that’s not technologically minded. Therefore, we took our time in selecting the right solution for the job to determine if it was feasible within the project time and budget. To get the client on board with this particular option, we brought them up to speed on both the pitfalls and possibilities of the tool we’d chosen, and demonstrated the user experience benefits it would provide for their end users.

We also built an automatic referencing system within the reports that allows the team to add references easily within the main body of the content. It also puts these references within a footer at the bottom of the document and removes any duplicates, making this task much more efficient for them.

Using our custom instant download feature

As well as the web-based interactive report, LEAP still required it to be available to download as a PDF version for anyone wishing to read it offline. To make this experience the best that it could be, we ensured its download time was as short as possible. This was made possible by using our own custom system, and we added new functionality to this to pre-generate and cache the PDF once the report has been saved, which makes the file instantly available to download. We also spent a long time making sure the printed report styling was on-point, as it’s important that the quality of the PDF matches that of the online report.

Conclusion

One of the key successes of the project is bringing data and information that could’ve been quite dull to life via a vibrant, engaging online platform. We’ve made it so much more user friendly for those inputting content to do so by instigating the new CMS. Our report download function has also reduced the download time from over 10 seconds to being instantaneous – a crucial saving that makes user experiences much more pleasant.

It’s been great to continuously work with the LEAP team to improve upon the site to promote the programme’s success. We’re incredibly pleased that this project will become the legacy for a community programme that’s benefited so many people and will showcase its outcome for its key audiences for the future.