Michael MacAuley, UK & Ireland general manager at digital platform Liferay, says that instead of sinking budgets into periodic website overhauls, charities should embrace continuous optimisation and choose adaptable, sustainable technology to better protect donor funds and maximise an organisation’s value.

The social impact sector tends to equate progress with people in the field, high-profile campaigns, or landmark legal wins. For the world’s oldest and largest animal charity, this year’s most effective intervention happened on a screen.

When someone reports a suspected case of cruelty to the RSPCA, speed is everything, which is why the charity’s rebuilt Report a Concern tool stripped away the administrative bottlenecks that traditionally slowed down response times.

Prior to the redesign, the online reporting portal required human operators to manually read and sort through submissions of animal neglect and cruelty – whether it was a critical report of animal starvation, a general question about pet care, a stray cat sighting, or automated spam – separate the noise from genuine emergencies.

That digital report could sit in a backlog for roughly a month before it was even flagged, validated, and assigned to a local inspection team.

The new digital system now triages and prioritises reports the moment they are made, allowing inspectors to bypass the admin headache and get straight to the most urgent cases.

This single interface overhaul cut response times on cruelty cases by 27 days. A better web form did what more inspectors or another campaign might have aimed for, and did it faster.

That work won the RSPCA and Liferay the Standout Charity Website of the Year title at the 2026 UK Digital Excellence Awards. The charity’s website now handles 25.9 million visits a year. The real story is not the award, but what meaningful change a website can achieve.

The Report a Concern tool is years in the making: the charity started the work back in 2010, replacing a rigid system that allowed it to speak to the public but could not listen to how people wanted to engage. From there the team improved the site steadily. Staff set up their own campaign pages; local branches managed the animals in their care through a private system and fed that local content back to the main site.

The RSPCA never tore the site down: It kept what worked, fixed what didn’t, and built the improvements.

Other charities can learn from this. Too many treat a website as an occasional expense – redesigned every few years, launched with fanfare, then watched as it ages and a much-needed overhaul becomes due. In a sector that operates on tight budgets and tighter scrutiny, that stop-start habit wastes both.

Data-driven optimisation

By choosing a more rigorous, iterative strategy, the RSPCA unlocked a major operational advantage. Instead of chasing flashy overhauls, the team established a rock-solid technical foundation and committed to continuous, data-driven optimisation. They anchored every design choice in real user behaviour, leveraging a shared library of pre-tested components to deploy consistent web pages.

Crucially, the charity abandoned expensive, bespoke development in favour of proven, off-the-shelf tools, allowing it to maximise its donor budget for direct public impact rather than redundant engineering.

The benefits of fixing the website quickly rippled out across the entire charity. Today, the RSPCA’s online tools are driving massive real-world change. The Find a Pet rehoming service now draws 6.4 million visits a year, while online school programmes have reached over 4,000 teachers and 23,500 students.

By making the website smoother and easier to navigate, the charity also protected its funding, inspiring people to give generously even at a time when donations were dropping across the wider charity sector. It similarly turned casual web browsers into real-world helpers, signing up 8,000 new national volunteers alongside thousands of local branch recruits.

Finally, the RSPCA has made sure it remains the leading authority on animal care. The charity now outranks its peers whenever people look up animal welfare advice, whether they are using traditional Google searches or asking AI tools for answers.

This longevity only pays off when you choose flexible tools that can grow with you, rather than systems that have to be replaced every few years.

For the wider sector, the RSPCA’s success is a lesson in not chasing traffic, but results. It’s time to stop measuring a website’s success in clicks and start measuring it in whether it delivers.

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