Bankuet: Rebuilding the donor experience

Context

Bankuet's donor experience lived in Squarespace. Changing donation options meant working around its page and form model; adding a food bank or fundraising campaign meant repeating setup; and the site connected awkwardly to the services behind it.

I moved the donor experience into an application we controlled, while keeping specialist services such as Beacon for payments and CRM. That made the experience easier to change, reduced setup work, and gave a small team a codebase it could keep extending.

Problems

• Changing the donation journey was hard. Donation options and steps were constrained by the Squarespace setup, so adapting the flow as Bankuet's needs changed was cumbersome.
• Adding food banks and campaigns repeated the same setup work. Technical food bank setup and fundraising campaign setup both required manual configuration.
• The website and operational systems were loosely connected. The donor site did not integrate cleanly with Beacon CRM and the other services Bankuet relied on.

Constraints

Rebuilding the app did not mean replacing every service. Three constraints shaped the architecture:

• The application needed to be extensible. It had to connect cleanly to multiple data sources and services, adapt as Bankuet's needs changed, and support future initiatives without another rebuild.
• The payment system had to stay proportionate to our scale. We needed flexible giving and Direct Debit without taking on the implementation and operational risk of a bespoke payment stack unless that extra control justified it.
• A small team needed to operate and adapt it. The application had to stay straightforward to run and change without a large engineering team.

Working hypothesis

If we owned the application layer but reused specialist services where they were strong, we could simplify giving, remove repeated setup work, and connect the donor experience to operational data without creating a system the team could not maintain.

Decisions and delivery

I recommended moving the donor experience out of Squarespace and built a Next.js app on Vercel. Rather than rebuild every capability, I connected it to existing services where that reduced risk or made the product easier to operate.

• Beacon rather than a bespoke payment layer. Rather than own card and Direct Debit flows, I embedded Beacon CRM donation forms. I had considered handling payments directly with Stripe and Supabase, but Beacon gave us flexible giving, Direct Debit and closer CRM integration with less implementation and operational risk.
• Supabase and Mapbox for food bank discovery. A Supabase Edge Function pulls food bank data from Beacon; Mapbox uses it for location search and maps on the donor site.
• Notion rather than a custom CMS. Colleagues already managed blog content in Notion, so I used it as the content system and retrieved posts through Notion's API. This reduced build scope and kept editorial control with non-technical colleagues.
• Look and feel. With our UX Lead, I implemented the visual redesign and standardised common sections in Figma and code. This made the experience more consistent and pages faster to design and build.

I also led structured pre-launch QA across pages and screen sizes.

Outcomes

The redesigned site launched in October 2025. The clearest measured gains were in technical food bank setup and the donation flow:

• Technical food bank setup time fell from approximately 45 minutes to 10 minutes.
• Fundraising campaign setup went from around one day to effectively instant.
• The donation flow was reduced from five steps to three.

Conversion measurement remains limited: the embedded Beacon donation form and application analytics sit across different systems. This case does not establish a conversion uplift attributable to the rebuild.