Cambridge
It Takes a City is a Cambridge-based charity working to break the cycle of poverty and homelessness for good. Their two core services, the Crossways Winter Project and The Haven, a women-only space, provide shelter, safety, advice and ongoing support to people at their most vulnerable.
famille worked with It Takes a City over 15 months through a mentoring programme run in partnership with Purpose Network, supporting Coordinator and Community Engagement Manager Matt Nelson on strategy and delivery across digital and social.
"Debbie has generously given her time and expertise to mentor me over the last year. Her support has been invaluable. Her enthusiasm and passion for getting comms right has helped me enormously."
The Challenge
It Takes a City’s existing website no longer reflected the charity, and it was actively getting in the way of the charity’s ability to secure funding. Funders were using it as a validation tool, and what they found didn’t reflect the organisation’s current work or ambition.
Behind the website problem sat a bigger one: the charity lacked a CMS that gave the team real control, internal stakeholders had not been aligned on what a new site needed to do, and there was no clear strategy for how to fund and commission the rebuild.
There were also genuine safeguarding considerations. Given the nature of It Takes a City’s service users, decisions about imagery, language and how the site handled sensitive audiences required careful thought, not just a brief to a web developer.
Debbie Larrad, famille’s Founder and Strategic Director. “The website no longer reflected who they are. It was causing real blockers with funding — funders were using it as a validation tool. And they had no proper CMS, so they were finding workarounds just to make basic updates.”
Aligning the stakeholders first
famille’s first task was not the website itself, it was helping It Takes A City understand how to gather and frame the right conversations internally, from trustees to the wider team, so that any eventual build would have genuine organisational buy-in and a brief that reflected real need rather than assumptions.
Protecting the brief when a free offer arrived
Mid-way through the process, web agency Delivered Social generously offered to build the site for free, part of a model developed during COVID to support charities with spare capacity. A generous offer, but one that carried risk: without the right spec and contractual clarity, It Takes a City could have ended up with a site that didn’t serve them.
famille worked with Matt to develop the right questions inform the technical and strategic spec, and understand what the handover would look like, including any future costs. The result was a successfully delivered website that reflected the charity’s strategy and gave the team real editorial control.
Once the website was in hand, famille turned attention to social media, specifically the problem of diminishing organic reach on LinkedIn, where even followers were no longer reliably seeing content. With no budget for paid social, the challenge was finding tactics that could cut through without spending.
The focus shifted to saveable and shareable content formats: ideas that would circulate beyond the immediate audience and build engagement with the people who matter most to It Takes a City, a local Cambridge audience and the city’s civic networks. famille also reviewed the charity’s Facebook presence and set out a framework for audience growth.
"LinkedIn's algorithms are no longer serving content to people who even follow you. So it was about finding tactics that don't rely on budget — how do you reach the people who really matter to you when you're working entirely organically?"
It Takes a City now has a website that accurately represents the charity and can be updated without workarounds. The safeguarding considerations that complicated earlier decisions are resolved in the new build.
On social media, the results speak for themselves. In the 12 months following the work with famille, It Takes a City’s LinkedIn presence grew entirely through organic activity:
new followers — all organic, up 97.1% against comparable organisations
more comments on posts than sector competitors
impressions over 12 months
reactions across content
comments received
reposts
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