What has changed on the hub?

The Foodbank Hub has traditionally been home to a lot of operational and logistical information, alongside downloadable resources that you’ve been able to print off and personalise for your project. This has traditionally been known as the Operating Manual and Resources.

What the relaunched Foodbank Hub aims to bring is more content to help you drive forward change, as well as continue to provide this day-to-day support.

Why have we changed this?

We launched a survey out to the network about the Foodbank Hub in early 2021. That feedback told us that whilst many find the hub an extremely useful and helpful tool, some of it felt incomplete and lacking clear navigation. In other circumstances, you told us that it wasn’t always easy to find the things you need.

So, in direct response to this feedback, the team have been working for several months on developing a new navigation and structure, implementing new functionalities as well as adding in some new bits of content.

• The navigation is now broken down into clear central categories of work.
• New functionality, such as having text on the page instead of in PDF format, will make information more accessible.
• We also have new strategic content, which didn’t have a natural place to sit on the previous version of the hub.

The aim for the hub now is to become a main portal of truth, or a central knowledge base for the network. We hope that if you have any questions or need any resources, guidance or tutorials, the hub will be the place where you access it all.

We know this relaunch and on-going work to make it an engaging and easy-to-navigate platform will have a huge impact on how you bring about even more transformational change. We also hope that with an easier design and layout, we can update core guidance much more quickly as well as provide it in a variety of different formats, such as in videos, audios and podcasts, infographics and more.

What are the major changes?

1. More strategically focused

• We have made space for and added in new strategic content that will help you along your strategic journey and enable you to take those first practical steps. The new strategic content can be found in the Engaging your Community section, Changing Local Policy in England section, the Participation section and some new governance tools on the Governance landing page. We also be adding more strategic content in the next few weeks and months for you to look over and dive into.

2. New navigation

• We recognised that the previous version of the hub, whilst easy to navigate from an operating manual sense, wasn’t always the most streamline of websites. We took feedback from the network last year and came up with a new structure to organise new and existing content. Now everything is arranged by categories of work instead.
• The main layout is here:

Please note that this is not an exhaustive list of all categories you’ll find on the hub, but rather an outline or overview.

The main areas to note are the ‘Running your food bank’ and ‘Building support for change’

• Running your food bank – this centres those inside your food bank operation. It looks at the operational and logistical aspects of running your food bank project, including collecting food, giving out food parcels, looking after your warehouse, your staff and volunteers, your referral agencies and those that are referred to you. It also looks at funding and the general governance of the food bank, including statutory policies and procedures.
• Building support for change – this centres on those outside of your food bank. It looks at those in your community that you can engage with for further support, such as local government, the media, schools and businesses. It also looks at research, both that Trussell Trust are doing and research you may want to conduct yourself. It also looks at our campaigns and how you can get involved.

3. Temporary removal of the resource table

• At the moment, we do not have a resource table like we had on the previous version of the hub. This is because of the large volume of new resources we’ve had and because we removed the chapter structure from before. Therefore, we need to come up with a new layout for the table, to ensure you can access the resources easily. We’ll be adding the resource table back in the coming few weeks so please keep an eye out for it. You can find the resources by using the search functionality or going to the relevant page, where the resources are collated at the bottom.

4. Operational content remains but removing Operating Manual structure

• As you’ll note from the new structure, we no longer reference the Operating Manual nor do we have chapters and chapter numbers. Instead, everything is now organised by categories, like Operations, People, Funding, etc. This is to allow us to add future content in seamlessly, without the need for developing new chapters every time. It also allows the hub to fall in line with how other websites and intranets are structured, making it easier to update.

5.  New page design

• As you will have seen, all of the content has been broken down into individual pages and sections, removing the need to use a PDF reader. The only circumstance where we’ve kept the PDF reader is in Financial Inclusion, but we will be updating this shortly. The content is now more accessible and user friendly, without the need of an additional plugin.

Those are the core areas that we have changed on the hub. We hope that the new design makes accessing guidance, tutorials and resources easier than ever before and the information will support you as you take the next steps on your strategic journey.

If you have any questions or concerns about the new, revamped hub then please reach out to us. You can either contact us via digitalhub@trusselltrust.org or you can use the feedback functionality, which is in the red box on the right-hand side of the page.