Perennial

Founded in 1839, Perennial is the only UK charity dedicated to supporting people in horticulture, offering financial, emotional, and practical help to thousands of professionals and retirees every year.

But the charity's website hadn't kept pace with how much digital engagement now mattered to that mission. It couldn't deliver the right content to the range of different audiences Perennial actually serves, and updating it was a slow, frustrating job for the charity's own team rather than something they could manage with confidence. Perennial needed a website that matched the scale of what it does, built to serve a genuinely wide community rather than a single generic audience.

With nine distinct audience groups to serve, accessibility and inclusivity ran through every website design decision including:

• updated imagery reflecting the diverse communities Perennial supports
• a modern, welcoming design built around the charity's brand
• and content restructured so navigation genuinely works for people who arrive with very different needs.

Storytelling improved too, making content like financial advice easier to engage with rather than something visitors have to work to get through.

Behind the scenes, we rebuilt the website on a more intuitive CMS, so the Perennial team could create and organise content confidently themselves, rather than finding every update slow and difficult. Clearer user journeys mean visitors now find support, resources, and ways to give without the site working against them.

The donation journey was optimised for a frictionless experience, and engagement with the Home & Garden section - a key driver of fundraising - improved as a direct result of the wider changes.

More people are finding their way to the content that drives support for Perennial's work. Interest in the Home & Garden section - the area most closely tied to fundraising - rose 34%, a meaningful shift for a charity that depends on public generosity as much as it does direct support requests.

Visitors are also spending more time engaging once they arrive, with average engagement time up 13% and engaged sessions rising 4%. Modest as those figures are on their own, they point in the same direction as everything else: a website that holds people's attention rather than losing them, across a genuinely wide range of audiences with very different reasons for being there.

For a charity approaching two centuries of work, that's not a small thing - a digital presence finally built to match the scale and diversity of who Perennial actually serves.