Prostate Cancer UK is one of the UK's most important health charities - funding research, running national awareness campaigns, supporting men and their families, and fighting for a future where no man dies from the disease. Their website is not a marketing tool. It is a public health asset, relied on by millions of people every year. Over five years of partnership, we have built and kept building the platform that carries that mission.
Year
2020 - Present
Industry
Charity & Not-for-Profit
Scope of Work
Technology
Where it started
The partnership began with a problem that looked technical but was really about trust. Prostate Cancer UK's site was slow: page loads that frustrated users trying to find urgent information, a platform that struggled under the traffic of their national campaigns, and a team that had lost confidence in what their website could do for them. They needed an honest diagnosis before anything else.
A Cogworks Umbraco Health Check gave them exactly that: a clear, detailed report on exactly what was wrong and why. What it revealed shaped the entire partnership that followed. The platform needed more than fixes. It needed to be rebuilt on foundations worthy of the work it had to do.
A donation page that proved the potential
Rather than commit to a full rebuild immediately, we proposed starting with the highest-stakes single page on the site: the donation page. If we could demonstrate what good looked like there, the case for the full platform would make itself.
The redesign was not cosmetic. We reduced cognitive load, clarified the hierarchy, and shifted the emotional framing: away from the risk of not donating, towards the immediate, tangible impact of giving. A dynamic widget connected the user directly to the cause, making the relationship between the donation amount and real outcomes visible. Within eight weeks of launch, online donation income rose 29%.
That proof of concept became the foundation for the full rebuild.
Rebuilt to carry the mission
The full site was rebuilt on Umbraco, designed responsively and accessibly from the ground up. The focus throughout was on the people who actually use it: men looking for information about their risk, families navigating a diagnosis, supporters fundraising for a cause they care about. Simplified IA, reduced page count, and a cleaner search experience all served the same goal: getting the right person to the right information as quickly as possible.
Two things deserve particular mention. PCUK's award-winning Risk Checker, which lets any man check his prostate cancer risk in 30 seconds, needed a platform that could carry the traffic it generated during major campaigns. We built and maintained the dedicated, editable page that houses it, engineered to handle the surges that come when the tool goes national. The search was also enhanced to connect users directly to the services, information, and support pages most relevant to their situation.
Built for national campaigns at scale
Prostate Cancer UK does not just maintain a website. They run national public health campaigns. When the charity partnered with NHS England to find 14,000 men who had missed prostate cancer diagnoses during the pandemic, their website was the front door for a major TV, billboard, and social media push across the UK. On the day of launch, specialist nurses took 250 calls, double the usual volume. The site handled its biggest ever traffic spike without missing a beat.
That kind of resilience does not happen by accident. The platform was architected on Azure with load balancing and autoscaling so traffic surges from campaigns and media coverage are absorbed rather than felt. The team at PCUK can run their biggest campaigns of the year with confidence that the platform will hold.
Got questions? We’ve got answers. Here’s everything you need to know about projects like this one.
We have an existing platform that is already live. How do you approach improving it without disrupting operations?
How do you balance the donation experience with the informational purpose of the site?
The people using our site are often in a difficult or frightened moment. How does that shape the design approach?
Our charity runs major national campaigns. How do you ensure the platform handles the traffic?
