Lloyd’s Register Foundation isn’t a household name, but their work touches lives across every continent — a global safety charity dedicated to maritime systems, sustainable infrastructure, and engineering education. Their research informs policy, their insights drive change, and their commitment to human flourishing in a complex, interconnected world is genuinely compelling.

But their digital presence wasn’t reflecting that impact. Users struggled to find crucial data and research. Partnerships were hard to discover. Worse, years of valuable insights were trapped in PDFs — brilliant work that might reach a researcher who knew to look, but invisible to the thousands who could benefit from it. And across the Foundation’s ecosystem, multiple sites operated in isolation: the Heritage Centre, the World Risk Poll, the main Foundation presence. Each functioning independently when they should have been working in concert.

As development lead, the work was about unification and liberation. We built a Drupal CMS that could hold together multiple strategic properties while letting each breathe with its own visual identity. We restructured the information architecture around what actually matters to the Foundation’s audience — their priorities, their regions, their questions. And we did something important: we took that trapped knowledge in PDFs and converted it into interactive web experiences with embedded data, videos, and the kind of discoverability that lets insights reach the people who need them.

We also invested in the Foundation’s future. A “Digital Academy” — six interactive training sessions covering digital attitudes, user-centered design, project management, data analytics, and sustainable practices. It’s one thing to hand over a new website. It’s another to build the internal capability so the team can move with confidence and keep improving.

The results validate the approach: total users grew 77%, and the World Risk Poll — one of the Foundation’s signature research pieces — saw page views jump 87%. But the real win is subtler. Critical safety research is now discoverable. Impact data is accessible. The Foundation’s voice on maritime systems, infrastructure resilience, and engineering education can reach audiences they couldn’t reach before.

That’s what a platform should do: get out of the way and let mission-driven work find the people it’s meant to serve.

You can read more here: https://numiko.com/projects/lloyds-register-foundation/

And you can visit the site here: https://www.lrfoundation.org.uk/