Building a future-ready platform for National Fostering Group’s foster care services
10+ weekly appointments booked
Improved user journeys
Enhanced accessibility
Increased inclusive, user-informed content
Transforming Foster Care Through Digital Innovation
Overview: As the UK’s largest independent foster care provider, National Fostering Group required a modern digital platform to better support and engage a diverse range of carers. Nimble partnered with them to deliver a full end-to-end transformation, combining user research, experience design, and scalable technology.
Through co-design sessions and usability testing, we created a website shaped directly by user needs, ensuring clear, accessible journeys for different audiences.
To support this, we transitioned their tech stack from a coupled architecture to a headless model, delivering a bespoke implementation of Contentful’s composable DXP.
This enabled significant improvements in Core Web Vitals through greater control over the presentation layer, while also giving National Fostering Group enhanced flexibility and ownership of their content delivery pipeline.
The result is a flexible, future-ready platform that enhances user engagement, improves conversion pathways, and delivers measurable operational efficiencies.
Scaling digital engagement for diverse audiences
The challenge: As the UK’s largest independent foster care provider, National Fostering Group needed a digital experience that could effectively support a wide range of carers with different needs, motivations, and levels of understanding. Their existing platform limited flexibility and made it difficult to adapt content or evolve the user experience over time.
National Fostering Group required a solution that would enable them to better engage prospective carers, support existing carers, and provide clear, relevant pathways for each audience group. This included simplifying complex user journeys and improving accessibility across the entire experience.
At the same time, they needed greater ownership of their platform, allowing internal teams to manage and update content independently without relying on technical support. The challenge was to bring together user insight, design, and technology to deliver a scalable, user-focused solution aligned to their national reach and impact.
User-led design with scalable platform delivery
The solution: Nimble delivered a comprehensive, full-stack solution that combined research, design, and engineering to meet National Fostering Group’s needs at scale. The project began with an in-depth discovery phase, engaging four key user groups to understand their journeys, motivations, and expectations. These insights directly informed a series of co-design sessions, where participants helped shape the site’s look, feel, and structure.
Designs were iteratively refined through focus groups and usability testing, ensuring the final experience was accessible, intuitive, and reflective of diverse audiences. Clear user journeys were established, enabling carers to quickly identify relevant pathways based on their experience level.
On the technical side, we re-platformed the website using Contentful and AWS, consolidating multiple sites into a single, scalable solution. This provided National Fostering Group with full editorial control and flexibility.
We also introduced key features such as a seamless “book a call” function, enabling carers to schedule appointments directly and significantly improving the efficiency of initial engagement.
Driving engagement and operational efficiency at scale
The results: The new website has enabled National Fostering Group to deliver a significantly improved digital experience aligned to their scale and reach.
Internally, the shift to Contentful has transformed how National Fostering Group manages their digital presence, giving teams the autonomy to update content quickly and efficiently without developer support
The introduction of streamlined user journeys and direct booking functionality has enhanced engagement and simplified key interactions, creating a more effective pathway from initial interest to action.
Overall, the platform provides a strong foundation for continued growth, enabling National Fostering Group to evolve their digital offering and better support their nationwide community.
The Technology Stack
In collaboration with National Fostering Group, Nimble carefully evaluated the available technologies in the current tech stack, architecture, and in-house capabilities to select the best technology for sustainable growth.
- Contentful – for Content Management System
- AWS – for secure, cloud-based infrastructure
- Next.js – for front end application
- Terraform – for reliable deployments through infrastructure as code
