Foodbank Australia

The work, across three rebuilds

• Rebuild 1 — Consolidation. Seven independent state websites merged into a single national platform under one brand. This phase was deliberately restrictive. National needed to assert what "Foodbank Australia online" meant before flexibility could be safely returned to the states.
• Rebuild 2 — Refinement. A minor rebrand and iteration on the existing platform. The point was steady improvement, not transformation.
• Rebuild 3 — Maturation. A twelve-month re-architecture in step with a major rebrand. By this point the states had operated as one organisation long enough that granular regional control could be designed back in — without breaking national unity. The platform now gives each state meaningful control over its own surface area within a shared governance frame.

The arc across those three rebuilds is the case study. The first asserted control. The third trusted the system. That's what digital maturity looks like.

What we did alongside the rebuilds

• Hosting and uptime stewardship of the donation portal and the Fine Food portal — the revenue-critical channels — across all three rebuilds, every rebrand, and the day-to-day in between.
• Annual Hunger Report builds, in collaboration with Foodbank's internal design team. The shift from PDF to interactive web page is the most visible part of that work; the operational discipline around producing a major annual publication on a digital surface is the part that keeps the lift going.
• Third-party integrations, including API work connecting Foodbank's services into the wider food-relief ecosystem so that Australians can find food relief near them through channels other than Foodbank's own site.
• Major-rebuild collaboration with the external brand agency on the most recent project — managing the build alongside a separate creative team, multiple internal stakeholders, and seven member-state perspectives.

What we're doing now

• Governance and policy. We're working with the national team on the policy documents and operating frameworks that keep a unified national presence sustainable — what gets centralised, what stays state-led, how decisions are made, who maintains what.
• Analytics positioning. Advising on how National can convert the advantage of a unified presence into measurable understanding — what's possible to see now that wasn't possible across seven separate sites.
• Ongoing maintenance. Keeping the platform healthy and the critical channels live as the organisation evolves.

What's changed

• The platform pulled meaningful traffic and held it. Sessions grew ~20% across the partnership (from 962,000 in 2022 to 1.16M at peak). Pageviews more than doubled over the same window — 2.2M in 2022, 4.6M in 2024 — with visitors moving from ~2.3 to ~4.0 pages per session. Engagement rate climbed from 52% to 83%.
• The Hunger Report became a digital publication, not a download. In its strongest year on the platform, the report drew more than 220,000 pageviews — alongside the recognition in Parliament and its standing as one of the most widely-read social-enterprise publications in the country.
• The platform reflects the organisation. Foodbank's site no longer represents seven competing voices held together by a brand guideline. It represents one organisation with seven members, with control distributed in a way the federated structure can actually live with.
• Revenue-critical paths held. Donation and Fine Food channels stayed live across three rebuilds and a major rebrand. That continuity is the part nobody notices when it works.
• A governance program in flight. The work shifted from "build the website" to "build the operating model around the website." That's the layer that compounds.

A note on the latest rebuild

Pageviews on the new platform are running below the 2023–24 peak. That's largely intentional. The third rebuild consolidated content, simplified navigation, and tightened the conversion paths for donation and Fine Food. A leaner site does fewer hops per visit by design — and the result is a leaner traffic profile, not a smaller business case. Engagement quality and conversion behaviour are what we're now watching with the National team, and they're the metrics the analytics work currently in flight is being designed around.

The throughline

Foodbank's online presence today is the product of six years of incremental maturation, not a single dramatic build. Each rebuild solved the problem the organisation was actually facing at the time — and earned the right to solve the next one.

We're not the whole picture here. Foodbank operates as a federated organisation with seven member states, an internal team, and a national leadership group, and that structure means no single partner — including us — can claim sole credit for what the organisation has achieved. What we can say is that we've been part of the work to mature the digital operation, and that the work is ongoing.

The point of a mature digital operation isn't that it looks finished. It's that it can keep producing outcomes like the Hunger Report.