When Lighthouse Foundation approached The Animals, they weren’t just looking for a new website. They were looking for a way to connect more of Australia’s most vulnerable children with families ready to care for them.
Lighthouse Foundation is a charitable organisation founded by Susan Barton AM — a pioneering Australian leader in addressing youth homelessness. Susan began caring for at-risk young people in her own home more than 40 years ago, before establishing the Foundation a decade later. Since then, Lighthouse Foundation has helped more than 1,000 young people transform their lives, with that number growing every year.
As the Foundation expanded its foster care services, it needed a digital presence to match. The brief was clear: build a website that would amplify Lighthouse Foster Care’s reach, tell their story compellingly, and drive more singles, couples, and families to consider foster care.
What The Animals delivered
Working in close partnership with the Lighthouse team, we delivered an end-to-end not-for-profit website design built specifically around the needs of prospective foster carers. The scope covered:
Full UX strategy, wireframing and user journey mapping — designed to guide visitors from awareness to inquiry as naturally as possible.
Digital design and asset creation, developed to maintain Lighthouse Foster Care’s existing brand identity while significantly lifting its visual impact online.
A fully functional, custom-built website — built for performance, accessibility, and ease of management by the internal team.
Ongoing digital strategy guidance — including content direction and paid media support to drive qualified traffic post-launch.
Every decision was made with one goal in mind: helping more vulnerable children find a safe, caring home.
The results
Within four months of launch, the results exceeded every benchmark we set at the outset.
3,800 new users visited the site in its first four months — a volume that would typically take a new site a year or more to build organically.
Traffic increased three-fold in the 30 days following launch, driven by a combination of organic search growth and targeted digital advertising.
Engagement metrics — including average session duration and pages per visit — significantly outperformed industry benchmarks for the not-for-profit sector, indicating visitors were genuinely connecting with the content and considering foster care as a result.
Why this project matters to us
Not-for-profit website design is one of the most meaningful categories of work a creative agency can take on. The stakes are different. The impact is real. When a website performs well for an organisation like Lighthouse Foundation, it isn’t a metric on a report — it’s a child finding a family.
We’re proud to have played a part in Lighthouse Foundation’s mission, and we look forward to continuing that partnership as their digital presence grows.
If you’re a charity, NFP, or social enterprise looking for a Melbourne web design agency that understands the unique challenges of the sector — we’d love to hear from you.
