RSPCA's Award Winning Work with Liferay
RSPCA built a new animal welfare educational website as part of their digital transformation journey and went on to win the UK Digital Excellence Awards 2026 Standout Public Sector / Not for Profit / Charity Website of the Year.
Key Takeaways
- Deliver content in a way that makes sense for your audience. RSPCA’s website facilitates great online and offline experiences for educators and students.
- Choose a solution that will help you measure success. By digitising their educational efforts with Liferay, RSPCA has been able to track results from field learning experiences and assess the effectiveness of their materials.
- Meet important timelines without sacrificing the features you need. RSPCA’s website had to launch before the school year, and Liferay’s extensive out-of-the-box functionality, along with the dedication of the implementation partner Webtown, helped make this a reality.
- Scale digital experiences across an entire organisation. RSPCA’s Keystone design system, built on Liferay, now powers seven distinct digital products — enabling consistent, accessible experiences for educators, children, volunteers, scientists, and colleagues alike.
Background
Established in 1824, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) is the oldest and largest animal welfare charity in the world with a focus on rescuing, rehabilitating, and rehoming or releasing animals across England and Wales.
Over two centuries of history, the RSPCA has built unparalleled expertise in animal welfare, but in a digital world, reaching the public, educators, volunteers, and policymakers at scale requires more than expertise alone. It requires a digital infrastructure capable of serving millions of people across multiple audiences and use cases, all while staying true to the charity's core mission: helping animals live better lives.
Challenges
Although one crucial aspect of RSPCA's mission involves educating local schools about animal welfare, their educational programme lacked innovation, with content distributed to educators as PDFs.
This outdated method of delivering educational content resulted in several problems, including:
- Materials that couldn't be updated fast enough. Guidance and advice on animal care is constantly evolving as research into what animals need changes.
- An inability to measure the performance of materials effectively. The nature of PDF distribution made it difficult to collect data on how students actually engaged with the materials.
- Fewer interactive learning opportunities for educators and students outside the classroom. Although educators and students craved learning opportunities beyond school, the existing delivery method made it difficult to monitor.
To address these challenges, RSPCA decided it was time to undergo a journey of digital transformation and move the animal welfare education programme to digital.
We created a fun, beautiful, and engaging journey, despite the complexity behind it. People love it because it's intuitive and easy to use. Liferay has so much capability.
Programme Manager, Digital Transformation, RSPCA
Implementation
RSPCA, a long-term Liferay customer, chose Liferay as their technology partner to create an educational website that would be easy to use for educators and parents, helping bridge the gap between on- and offline experiences. Liferay Partner Webtown handled the implementation process and solution project management.
As a result of Liferay's rich out-of-the-box functionality as well as an agile methodology, Webtown was able to deliver the solution on time in the face of a challenging deadline – the start of the new school year. Initial testing and iteration increased overall engagement from 40% to 78%, with the library and practical activities reaching as high as 90%.
The success of the initial educational platform laid the groundwork for a far broader digital transformation. Building on Liferay's low/no-code platform capabilities, RSPCA developed “Keystone” – a bespoke design system now on its fourth version – enabling rapid deployment of consistent, user-centric experiences across the organisation.
The team adopted Liferay's out-of-the-box solutions as a cornerstone of their sustainability strategy, minimising custom development while maximising flexibility and reach.
The transformation was shaped by a Double Diamond delivery approach, research-driven, continuously tested, and optimised through an always-on programme of four to six live experiments at any given time. This rigour ensured that every digital product launched was built on evidence, not assumption.
Results
Today, RSPCA's website enables exceptional online and offline experiences. Educational content is created and updated on the website as easily printable resources that educators can take into nature for immersive learning with students. Afterwards, educators can put the results of the learning time into RSPCA's system and receive certificates for their students.
The Liferay-powered Keystone design system now underpins seven distinct digital products: the core website, an education platform, a children's Next Gen platform, a science platform, a politics platform, a volunteer platform, and an internal intranet, all delivered with AA WCAG accessibility compliance.
The new Liferay-built solution has reaped these benefits:
- Easy content updating of the solution. Now that content primarily lives on the website, it's easy for business users to use Liferay's intuitive CMS capabilities to keep content fresh and relevant.
- More meaningful tracking of educational impact. With the results educators upload into the system as well as the certificates, both RSPCA and educators can identify which lessons have been taught and how many students have received certificates.
- Educators and parents are happy with the system. Educators and parents have expressed their enthusiasm for the new website and its potential as a great educational resource for students.
- Sector-leading digital visibility. RSPCA achieved a 16% year-on-year increase in visibility, the highest in the entire charity sector, and secured the #1 position in the animal welfare sector for Large Language Model (LLM) and AI visibility.
- Faster response to cruelty and neglect cases. A new digital triage tool reduced response time for cruelty and neglect cases by 27 days, a direct, measurable improvement in animal welfare outcomes.
- Improved donation conversion against sector trends. RSPCA achieved a 1.8% increase in donation conversion rate in 2025, even as the broader charity sector saw declines.
- Substantial audience growth across platforms. The education platform attracted 4,000+ educators and 23,500+ students; the volunteer platform recruited 8,000+ volunteers nationally; and the pet rehoming platform now serves 6.4 million annual sessions.
- Rapid internal adoption. The Liferay-powered internal intranet achieved 60% colleague adoption in its first week, reaching 1,200 users.
- Civic engagement at scale. Over 406,000 petition signatures and MP actions were recorded in 2024–2025, with a 33% improvement in site speed performance enabling the seamless experience that supports this scale of engagement.
Award Recognition
RSPCA's digital transformation was recognised at the UK Digital Excellence Awards 2026, winning the Standout Public Sector/Not-for-Profit/Charity Website of the Year category.
The submission (spanning rspca.org.uk and its associated platforms) was commended for its innovative digital experiences, search-intent-driven content design, and robust OKR frameworks connecting digital metrics directly to real animal welfare outcomes.
Serving 25.9 million sessions annually, RSPCA's digital estate exemplifies what is possible when a charity commits to genuine digital excellence, not as an end in itself, but as a means to fulfil a mission that has endured for over 200 years.
The RSPCA's transformation turned a 200-year-old organisation into a digital leader while maintaining focus on their core mission: helping animals live better lives.
With the new website and broader digital ecosystem, RSPCA is pairing digital transformation with real-world impact, aiding their mission to make the world a better place for animals and humans.
Solutions used: Liferay DXP – Enterprise Websites, Intranets, Customer Portals
Implementation partner: Webtown
