Family for Every Child

2021 Ongoing · WordPress, Divi, Leaflet.js, Geolocation, Looker Studio, Technical Consultancy

About This Project

Family for Every Child is a global alliance of over 50 local civil society organisations working on the front line with children and families across Africa, Asia, the Pacific, the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East. The alliance grew out of a UK children's charity called EveryChild, which made the radical decision to close itself down and transfer all of its assets to a truly global coalition of local organisations, led by the people working in the communities they serve rather than coordinated from a single UK headquarters.

The result is an organisation doing important work. Their members support hundreds of thousands of children and families around the world, covering child protection, kinship care, children on the move, and the prevention of sexual violence. Their Blue Umbrella Day campaign, held on 16 April each year to raise awareness of sexual violence against boys, was recently referenced in a United Nations Special Rapporteur's report and recommended for international recognition. That's a small charity making noise at the highest levels of global policy.

My role with Family for Every Child covers their full web presence and extends into technical advisory and consultancy work. It's an ongoing relationship that spans development, maintenance, security, campaign support, and strategic input.

The Main Website

The global website at familyforeverychild.org is built on WordPress with Divi and hosted on SiteGround. It serves as the public face of the alliance, covering their work, their member organisations, their resource library, news and campaigns, governance documents, and donation pathways for supporters in the UK, New Zealand, and the United States.

My role covers ongoing maintenance, development, and technical support. That includes keeping everything updated, building new pages and sections as the charity's campaigns and programmes evolve, and making sure the site stays secure and performant. For a charity with a global audience, reliability matters. The site needs to work just as well for someone reading it in Wellington as it does for someone in London.

The Resource Library and Alliance Members

The alliance has over 50 member organisations, and each one has its own dedicated page on the site. These pages cover who they are, where they work, when they were founded, and how they approach their work with children and families. But the interesting part is what happens underneath.

Resources, news articles, stories, podcasts, and campaign content can all be attributed to specific alliance members. So when you visit a member's page, you don't just get a description of the organisation. You get a living feed of everything they've contributed to and been involved in across the alliance. A member like Butterflies in India, for example, has their page automatically populated with related resources on child participation, mental health support, prevention of sexual violence, and their wider project work.

The resource library itself is filterable by topic, alliance member, country, and resource format. That's four independent filter dimensions across a library spanning reports, podcasts, webinars, guidance papers, position papers, and campaign materials. For an alliance operating across 41 countries with members working on different issues in different contexts, being able to slice the library by any combination of those filters is what makes it useful rather than just a long list of PDFs.

The whole system is managed through WordPress so the team can add new members, publish new resources, and assign attributions without any development work. The relationships between content and members are handled through the CMS, and the templates take care of surfacing the right content in the right places.

Analytics Dashboard

Family for Every Child's digital presence doesn't live in one place. There's the main website, the Changemakers for Children community platform, the Integration Toolkit microsite, a virtual gallery, and active social media and email marketing channels. Each one generates its own data, and trying to get a clear picture of how everything is performing by logging into each platform separately isn't practical for a small team.

I built a centralised analytics dashboard in Google Looker Studio that pulls data from all of these sources into one place. Website analytics from across the different sites are broken out into relevant sections so the team can see traffic, engagement, and content performance for each property without having to dig through raw Google Analytics. Social media metrics and Mailchimp email campaign data are included alongside the web analytics, giving the team a single view of how their digital activity is performing across every channel.

The dashboard is designed to surface the information the team actually needs for reporting and decision-making, broken down into relevant areas and topics rather than presented as a wall of numbers. For a charity that needs to report to funders, trustees, and member organisations on the impact of its communications, having that data accessible and clearly presented makes a real difference.

Geolocation

One of the more important technical features on the site is the geolocation system. Family for Every Child has a significant supporter base in New Zealand, and visitors from that region see a different version of the site to everyone else. The geo-targeting detects where a visitor is coming from and adjusts the experience accordingly, showing relevant donation pathways, regional content, and navigation prompts. A visitor from New Zealand is greeted with a prompt to visit the Aotearoa site, while visitors from elsewhere see the global site as standard.

This is important because the charity operates across multiple legal entities (a UK registered charity, a New Zealand trust, and a US 501(c)(3) non-profit), and the supporter experience needs to reflect that. Getting donation pathways wrong means someone in Auckland could end up on a UK donation page with the wrong currency, which creates friction and loses donations. The geo-targeting makes sure people land in the right place without having to think about it.

The Interactive World Map

The main site features an interactive world map built as a WordPress plugin using Leaflet.js. It plots every member organisation in the alliance across 41 countries. Hovering over a marker shows the organisation's name and location, and clicking through takes you to more information about their work. Leaflet was chosen because it's lightweight and loads quickly on the kind of connections you'd find across the charity's global audience.

The New Zealand Site

Family for Every Child has a regional presence in New Zealand with its own section of the website. I built this out with other members of the comms team, implementing responsive typography using CSS clamp() for fluid scaling across devices and addressing mobile navigation issues to make sure everything worked properly on phones and tablets. The NZ site needed to feel like part of the same brand while serving a more locally focused audience with region-specific content and donation pathways.

Blue Umbrella Day

Blue Umbrella Day is Family for Every Child's flagship campaign, calling for the international recognition of 16 April as a day to raise awareness and prevent sexual violence against boys. The campaign has gathered over 50,000 petition signatures and was referenced in a UN Special Rapporteur's report submitted to the Human Rights Council in early 2026, with a recommendation for international recognition of the day.

I was closely involved in the technical side of the campaign, building the petition forms within the WordPress website and serving them in six different languages to support the global reach of the campaign. When your petition needs to collect signatures from supporters across dozens of countries in their own language, the forms need to work flawlessly in every one of them. It was a small but important contribution to a campaign that's achieving real results at the highest levels of international policy.

Security

The site underwent a professional penetration test, and I handled the remediation of all findings. This included working through the results methodically, separating genuine vulnerabilities from false positives, implementing the fixes, verifying them, and writing up the remediation documentation. Security is part of the regular maintenance cycle for the site, with updates applied promptly and the broader WordPress security landscape monitored on an ongoing basis.

Technical Advisory

Beyond the development work, I'm often brought in when the charity needs a technical perspective on a decision. One example was evaluating the Changemakers for Children community platform. The team wanted to understand whether the platform was the right fit for their needs, and whether there was something better suited available. I worked alongside other members of the Family for Every Child team to research alternative platforms, assess what each one offered against the charity's actual requirements, and build a comprehensive comparison report. After a thorough evaluation, the team circled back to the existing provider and renegotiated the arrangement based on the findings, arriving at a setup that better served the charity's needs.

The technical advisory work isn't always about platforms either. It can be anything from evaluating a vendor proposal to helping the team think through how to approach a new project. Sometimes it results in a report or a recommendation. Sometimes it's just a useful conversation that helps move things forward.

Digital Transformation

Family for Every Child brought in an external consultant, Bertie Bosrédon, to help transform the charity's ways of working. I was closely involved in the project, helping to implement several of the changes that came out of that process. The work covered how the team used digital tools, how they collaborated across countries, and how they could operate more efficiently with the technology available to them. My role was practical rather than strategic: taking the recommendations and helping to action them.

Related Work

The Integration Toolkit for Family for Every Child, a standalone microsite covering their work on supporting the integration of children and young people on the move, is covered in its own dedicated portfolio entry.

The Relationship

Family for Every Child is an organisation I'm proud to work with. The alliance and its members do important work for children and families around the world, and the team are good people doing hard work in difficult contexts. My role has grown over time from straightforward WordPress development into something broader, and I'm grateful for the trust they've placed in me to be part of that.