Citizens Advice digital strategy and Episerver CMS implementation

A little background

Citizens Advice is a charity that provides free advice to the public from over 3,200 locations nationally through more than 20,000 volunteers.

Nexer has a long-standing relationship with Citizens Advice stretching back over 15 years. During this time we designed and developed all of the organisation’s websites, from their award-winning Adviceguide (now incorporated into the main site) to CABlink, the bureau extranet that provides vital information to the network of over 20,000 staff and volunteers nationally. Collectively, the public facing sites attract over 15M unique visitors each year.

The project

Nexer completed a major revamp of the national digital strategy. We redesigned and moved all of the sites on to the Episerver .NET Content Management System (CMS) and brought together all of the sites and platforms (internally and externally) into a single domain in both the front and back end of the service – this was a pretty daunting undertaking! As part of this new strategy, Nexer advised Citizens Advice on user engagement strategy and implemented innovative new service delivery approaches. During this process, we continued to provide a comprehensive management and support service for the organisation’s primary digital channels. The new site has recently been launched and can be found here www.citizensadvice.org.uk.

What we did

Some of the new approaches and features that have been delivered are:

• Alignment with GOV.UK design principles delivering a clean, user-focused approach with an emphasis on clear user journeys and simple, easy-to-use functionality over ‘aesthetic beauty’
• A far greater emphasis on self-service, including integration with live chat, development of personalised user journeys and diagnostics, and leading-edge search functionality
• Community and collaboration features that enable people to interact with and support one another in a way that has never been possible before
• An improved donation process with more powerful transactional functionality and a new payment gateway. We have introduced a number of PET (Persuasion, Emotion, Trust) design principles which significantly enhance conversions in the donation process
• More focus on the advocacy and policy influencing arm of the organisation, supporting campaigns, publications, and whitepapers