2021 Umbraco Award Winners

The awards are open to all solutions, apps and tech built with Umbraco, the open-source content management system used by more than 700,000 websites around the world. Traditionally held at Umbraco’s international headquarters in Denmark, this year’s event moved online due to the coronavirus. 

Zeroseven took out the prestigious Jury’s Choice Award, which spotlights the solution that best utilises the full potential of Umbraco, for their extensive redesign of Australian not-for-profit organisation GIVIT’s website. 

Zeroseven co-founder and managing director Chris Thompson said it was an honour to be chosen from a community of more than 220,000 active members to win the award. 

“Umbraco isn’t just a content management system,” Mr Thompson said. “It’s a living, breathing community of like-minded individuals wanting to build better websites and maybe even a better web, and we’re thrilled to be part of that process.

“More importantly, we’re proud to be recognised for this project in particular, which aims to inspire a culture of giving and make a positive difference in Australia.” 

The GIVIT site connects charitable donors with more than 4,000 support organisations helping vulnerable people and communities throughout Australia. Since 2009, more than 3.5 million items have been donated to people in need through GIVIT. 

Last year, GIVIT engaged Zeroseven to redesign their website and redevelop their back-end systems to make it more inviting for the public to donate goods and make financial donations; empower the GIVIT team to create pages and edit content without assistance from an external developer; and streamline and optimise the processes that drive the organisation’s operations.   

“We utilised Umbraco as part of a solution that made the process of using GIVIT as smooth and seamless as possible,” Mr Thompson said. 

“We undertook extensive research around the user interface flow of financial donations to develop a new ‘Fund’ functionality, and provided the GIVIT team with a clean and simple CMS that they can use to add and update their own content with ease.” 

What the client said

Nikki Howson, national manager at GIVIT, said the new site has revolutionised the way the organisation operates.

“With the Umbraco CMS and the templates built by Zeroseven, it’s so easy for us to update content, add new appeals whenever we need to, and react to events as they occur,” Ms Howson said.

Ms Howson said the new site had increased monthly traffic by 60 per cent, with cash donations to GIVIT’s annual Back to School campaign – the first to be run using the new ‘Fund’ functionality – increasing by 165 per cent from last year.

What the jury said

The Umbraco Jury said Zeroseven’s work on the GIVIT redesign set the standard for just how much value can be extracted from the platform.

“The website makes it easy to donate money and items or volunteer time to a worthy charity,” the Jury said in a statement. “The site is well-designed and easy to use.”