The Ditchley Foundation
A new Craft CMS website for the Ditchley Foundation, with programmes synced from Salesforce and Stripe-powered donations and recurring giving.
Sector
Not-for-profit and policy
Technologies
Craft CMS / Salesforce / Stripe
Overview
The Ditchley Foundation is one of the UK's most respected international policy forums, bringing together government, business and technology leaders from across the world to address complex geopolitical challenges. Based at Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire, the Foundation has been facilitating frank, confidential dialogue across partisan divides since 1958.
The new ditchley.com needed to reflect the organisation's standing and serve a genuinely international audience, while giving the team a practical platform for managing a busy programme of events and publishing editorial content.
Technical highlights
Salesforce programme integration
A one-directional sync between Salesforce and Craft CMS keeps programme listings accurate and current. Draft entries are created automatically when programmes go public in Salesforce, and deletions and status changes propagate to the site without manual intervention.
Stripe donations and subscriptions
A full donations platform supporting single and recurring gifts in multiple currencies, with preset and custom denominations, Gift Aid collection, automated confirmation emails to donors and the Foundation, and subscription management via Stripe's customer portal.
Filterable programme listings
Upcoming and past programmes are presented in separate, paginated views, filterable by thematic category and strand. Past programmes are grouped by year, with major events highlighted throughout.
Auto-delisting opportunities
Job and internship listings carry a closing date and are automatically removed from the site when that date passes, keeping the opportunities section current without requiring manual housekeeping.
Cookie consent and analytics
A fully compliant cookie consent mechanism controls the loading of third-party services, including Google Analytics and Hotjar, with user preferences stored for 365 days and a policy page generated automatically via CookieYes.
Site-wide search
The site includes a full text search across all public-facing pages, covering both current content and a deep archive of past programmes stretching back decades. For an organisation with Ditchley's history, the ability to surface older material alongside current thinking is a practical necessity for researchers and returning members of the community.
The challenge
The Foundation's programme of events sits at the heart of everything Ditchley does, but the previous site made it difficult to present that programme clearly and keep it up to date. Programme data was managed in Salesforce, the organisation's CRM, and maintaining a separate parallel record on the website created unnecessary overhead and risk of inconsistency.
At the same time, the site needed to support online donations, including recurring giving, as a meaningful channel for sustaining the Foundation's work. And with an audience spanning senior figures across government, academia and the private sector in multiple countries, the site had to carry the weight of the Ditchley name both editorially and visually.
What we built
The site is built on Craft CMS, giving the Ditchley team full editorial control over content while a live integration with Salesforce keeps programme data accurate without duplication of effort.
When a programme's status is set to public in Salesforce, a draft entry is automatically created in Craft CMS, ready for the editorial team to enrich with content before publishing. Updates to programme metadata in Salesforce flow through to the site automatically, and programmes are removed from the site when they are marked private or deleted. This means the team manages programme data in one place, with the website reflecting it reliably.
The donations platform is built on Stripe, supporting one-off donations in multiple currencies as well as monthly and annual giving. Donors can choose from preset amounts or enter their own, and the system handles Gift Aid eligibility, confirmation emails and a full record of donations within the CMS. Subscription management is handled through the Stripe customer portal.
The programme section presents upcoming and past events in filterable, paginated listings, with the ability to filter by thematic category and strand across Ditchley's four core themes: Geopolitics, Democracy, Technology, and Energy and Climate.
Ongoing support, maintenance and updates
We continue to support the Ditchley Foundation team on an ongoing basis, managing CMS and plugin updates, security patches, hosting and technical maintenance to keep the site stable, secure and up to date as the platform evolves.
The result
The new Ditchley site gives the Foundation a digital presence that matches the quality and seriousness of the organisation, while significantly reducing the editorial overhead of keeping the programme up to date. The Salesforce integration in particular removes a meaningful source of friction for the team, and the Stripe-powered donations platform gives supporters a straightforward, trustworthy way to contribute to the Foundation's work.
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