Trussell Case Study

Trussell (formerly the Trussell Trust) is an anti-poverty charity and community of food banks. It works to ensure no one needs a food bank to survive, as well as providing food and practical support to people who don’t have enough money to live on.

Trussell’s community includes 1400 food banks and 36,000 volunteers. In the financial year 2023/24, its community of food banks delivered 3.1 million emergency food parcels.

Trussell (then the Trussell Trust) wanted to understand more about how users interacted with its website in preparation for a website redevelopment programme, and to make improvements to the current site in the interim.

Webtrends Optimize initially ran a baseline test on the homepage to help Trussell understand how the existing homepage was used. The homepage contained a search tool for users to find their local food bank using their postcode. Although this tool was positioned low down the page, the baseline revealed that it was the most clicked element.

Using this insight, an A/B test was set up using Webtrends Optimize to bring the food bank search tool much higher up the page.

This variant had a 16% uplift on user interactions with the search bar on desktop and tablet, and an even higher uplift of 110% on mobile. The winning variant allowed users to more quickly and easily find the content they were looking for and move into the next stage of their journey to access a food bank. An unexpected effect of the variant was that financial donations from the homepage also increased.

Using these results, the find a food bank search was brought higher up the page, which allowed users that needed it to find the food bank search bar more quickly and easily. It also helped to inform further revisions to the page, ensuring that content aimed at users who needed to access help from a food bank was given more prominence on the website. Previously, there had been a lot of content and elements on the homepage which were not interacted with. A new and simplified version of the homepage was created, which ensured the journey for accessing help was front and centre.