Greater London Authority

The Greater London Authority chose Zoocha for the Team London project, creating one modern platform to replace two sites and make volunteering easy, inclusive, and impactful.

11.4%

Increase in sessions

47.6%

Boost in average session duration

27.3%

Drop in bounce rate

Birdseye view of London and the river Thames at night

The ask

In a rapidly evolving capital, where the challenges are as big as the opportunities, civic participation has never been more vital. The Mayor of London’s vision was to enable Londoners to play a more active role in their communities and around London:

“I will work with communities and civil society groups across London to encourage active participation in community and civic life. That means supporting Londoners of all ages to volunteer and to take action to improve our city.” - Sadiq Khan (Mayor of London)

The goal of the Team London project is to encourage all Londoners to become active citizens and to give their free time to make the UK's capital city a better place. Specific objectives were around:

Developing our understanding of how to inspire and retain volunteers
Ensuring that the programme is appealing to a broad range of audiences in London
Enabling volunteers to have easy, online access to be able to search for opportunities that meet their needs and to apply with as little friction as possible

GLA had two existing legacy volunteering micro-sites that fulfilled this service, which GLA wanted to replace with a single unified volunteering platform on the London.gov.uk domain, using their preferred Drupal 8 technology choice.

Man walking along a street of bright coloured building with earphones in

The approach

We kicked things off by giving the GLA’s existing Drupal 7 install profile a new lease on life, porting it to Drupal 8 to create a scalable foundation for future microsites. This meant we could deliver a solution that was both consistent and flexible.

We used the Group module to give multiple users within each organisation the ability to manage their own content while ensuring permissions stayed tight. Changes to profiles and roles went through a custom workflow using Drupal core’s content moderation.

Two people sitting in front of St Paul's cathedral chatting.

For search, we brought in Apache Solr and added geospatial filtering so users could search for opportunities by location with both list and map views, distance markers, and travel info.

On the frontend, we built a custom Drupal 8 base theme that met WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standards, and leaned into modern CSS grid layouts for full design flexibility. Performance was a key focus too so we stripped out the bloat, minified assets, and separated frontend components to load only when needed.

We also built in multi-step forms that saved progress at each step, created clear dashboards for both volunteers and providers, and added SLA-triggered notifications to keep everything ticking along. Every touchpoint was designed to reduce friction and keep people engaged.

Mobile view of GLA site on a background of a woman looking at phone at nighttime with a red glow

The results

The Team London relaunch went live on May 14th 2019 and immediately showed what a difference a thoughtful, user-first rebuild can make.

325,000 sessions p.a.
3 minute 30 average session duration
55% bounce rate

In the 17 days since live to 31st May:

17,000 sessions (362,000 sessions p.a.) = 11.4% increase
5 minute 10 avg session duration = 47.6% increase
40% bounce rate = 27.3% decrease

From a tech perspective, the site is now faster, smarter, and more maintainable. It’s built to GDS standards, lives on the London.gov.uk domain, and is fully open source with the code publicly available on GitHub here for total transparency.