How do you tell the story of a 10-year programme, including all the important learnings and outcomes, without overwhelming your audience?

That was the challenge for LEAP’s Communications Team as things drew to a close in March 2025. Phil Byrne explains how the team designed a website (The Story of LEAP) that let the audience decide where to hop on and off along the journey.

Back in 2020, LEAP was looking at new ways to present its impact on the outcomes for pregnant women, babies and children and their families. Traditional long-hand reports were sitting idly on the old LEAP website as PDF files that people weren’t downloading.

Our research found that several progressive 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:

The GOV.UK website was one of the pioneers advocating for publishing content in HTML, as webpages, not PDFs.

We thus had 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. 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 audiences, 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 from 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 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. 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 didn’t 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’s about:

In essence, it’s vital to deliver your headline messages as plainly and efficiently as possible. Never hide your most compelling content because a large part of the audience will act on it without drilling down. Of course, others will need the detail, which all persuasive content should aim to deliver in an accessible way.

It’s also about respecting the audience’s time. Policy makers, influencers, practitioners and other key stakeholders all share one thing in common; they’re time-stressed individuals, some of whom will be part of our early-year family audiences (who also don’t have time to idle).

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’re interested.

Using Google Analytics, we tracked key metrics that would establish how effective our changes had been. We saw advances in almost every area, and importantly the most significant ones. 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 the vast majority 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.