About the project
Project Overview
The Cystic Fibrosis Trust website is the digital home of the UK's leading cystic fibrosis (CF) charity. It serves a wide audience — people living with CF, their families, healthcare professionals, clinical researchers, and supporters — all from a single platform. The site brings together a news and information hub, online donations, a searchable clinical trials database, a learning portal for healthcare professionals, and a community forum into one joined-up experience.
What the Website Does
- Publishes news, events, and research updates relevant to the CF community
- Hosts a searchable database of ongoing and recruiting clinical trials, with filters for trial type, phase, age group, location, and more
- Enables online donations via PayPal, card payment, or Direct Debit — including one-off gifts, regular giving, in-memory donations, and tribute funds
- Provides a Learning Portal where healthcare professionals can enrol in structured courses, complete assessments, and track their progress
- Remembers what a visitor has done on the site — such as viewing a donation page or attending an event — and tailors the content they see accordingly
- Hosts a community forum that users can access with their existing website login, no separate account needed
- Offers a wide range of forms for fundraising sign-ups, resource orders, newsletter subscriptions, and award applications
- Keeps the charity's supporter database up to date automatically whenever someone registers, updates their details, or makes a donation
Key Numbers
- 3 payment options for donors (PayPal, card, Direct Debit)
- 30+ forms covering fundraising, campaigns, newsletters, and resource requests
- A clinical trials database with multiple filter options
- Structured online courses with progress tracking for healthcare professionals
- Real-time data sync to the charity's supporter database
How It Was Built
1. Content Management
A large team across the charity publishes and manages content through a structured, permission-based admin system. Different team members have access to only the areas they need — news editors manage news, event editors manage events, and a dedicated clinical trials editor manages the trials database. All content goes through a review and approval process before it goes live, and content can be scheduled to publish or unpublish at a specific date and time.
Pages are built using a flexible set of reusable building blocks — hero banners, image grids, quote panels, tabbed sections, and more — that editors can mix and match without any technical help. This means the marketing team can build rich, on-brand pages independently.
2. Online Donations
The donation journey is designed to be as simple and frictionless as possible. Supporters can choose how they want to give — a one-off card payment via PayPal
or Worldpay, or a regular Direct Debit — and the system validates their bank details in real time before they submit. Donors can also choose whether their gift is in memory of someone, for a tribute fund, or for a specific campaign. The checkout process is straightforward and works on any device.
3. Keeping the Supporter Database Up to Date
Every time someone creates an account, updates their details, or completes a donation, that information is automatically and securely sent to the charity's supporter CRM system. This happens in the background without any manual effort from staff, keeping the charity's records accurate and up to date for supporter care and reporting.
4. Learning Portal for Healthcare Professionals
Healthcare professionals and clinical research teams can log in to access a dedicated area of the site where they can take structured courses, work through course sections at their own pace, and complete knowledge check quizzes. Their progress is tracked and saved, and a personal dashboard gives them a clear view of what they've completed and what's next.
Smart Features That Make It Work
Personalised Content
The site quietly keeps track of what a visitor is interested in — for example, whether they've viewed donation pages or event listings — and uses that information to show them more relevant content and calls to action as they browse. This all happens without storing any personal data or requiring the visitor to log in.
Campaign Tracking
When a supporter clicks through from a fundraising email or campaign link, the site remembers which campaign brought them there. Even if they browse around for a while before donating, the charity still knows which appeal prompted the gift — essential information for understanding what's working in their fundraising.
Easy Address Entry
On registration, donation, and account pages, users can simply type their postcode and then select their full address from a list. This reduces the effort of filling out
forms and helps ensure the charity holds accurate address information for its supporters.
One Login for Everything
Users who want to join the charity's online community forum don't need a separate account. Their existing website login works automatically, taking them straight into the forum without any additional sign-in steps.
Powerful Search
A high-performance search engine runs across the whole site, making it quick to find news articles, events, resources, and clinical trials. Visitors can filter results in multiple ways to narrow down exactly what they're looking for.
Security and Reliability
- Payment card details never pass through the charity's own systems — they are handled entirely by PayPal and Worldpay's secure, regulated payment services
- The site includes multiple layers of spam and bot protection to keep forms and user accounts safe
- Non-public environments (for testing and development) are password-protected to prevent accidental exposure
- Updates to the site go through automated testing and a staged review process before they reach the live website
The Result
The Cystic Fibrosis Trust has a modern, fully integrated digital platform that:
- Supports the charity's fundraising mission with a smooth, multi-option donation journey
- Gives the CF community an authoritative, always up-to-date resource for news, events, clinical trials, and education
- Empowers a large internal team to publish and manage content independently, without needing developer involvement for everyday tasks
- Keeps supporter data accurate in the charity's CRM automatically, saving staff time and improving supporter care
- Delivers a tailored experience to each visitor without compromising privacy or performance
Why Drupal was chosen
- Flexibility — The platform needed to do many things at once: run a charity website, process donations, host a learning portal, manage a clinical trials database, and sync to a CRM. Drupal could handle all of this within one system
- Control over who can do what — With a large team of editors across different departments, it was essential to give each person access to only what they needed. Drupal's permissions system made this straightforward to configure
- A proven foundation for online giving — Drupal's commerce tools provided a solid, extensible base for building the charity's donation flows, including support for custom payment methods like Direct Debit
- Performance at scale — Built-in caching and a powerful search engine keep the site fast even during busy fundraising campaigns
- Security — Enterprise-grade security controls meet the standards expected of a high-profile charity handling donor data and financial transactions
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
- Drupal Commerce - Powers the donation checkout, payment processing, and order management
- Search API + Apache Solr - Provides fast, filterable search across all site content
- Smart Content - Delivers personalised content blocks based on a visitor's browsing behaviour
- Discourse SSO - Connects the forum so users log in once to access everything
- Permissions by Term - Controls which users can access which content based on categories
- Profile - Stores extended information about supporters and learners
