C40 Cities Finance Facility (CFF)

Background

C40 Cities Finance Facility helps cities prepare sustainable infrastructure projects and connect them with the finance and technical support needed to bring those projects forward.

Its previous website had been in place since 2017. During that time, CFF’s brand guidance and communication needs had developed, and the website was carrying a wider range of project stories, tools, application information, partnerships, and programme content.

The new site needed to speak to several audiences, including city teams, funders, partners, financial institutions, researchers, and policymakers, while giving the CFF team a better way to keep that content current. The brief was therefore as much about publishing as presentation: the website needed to reflect the updated CFF identity while giving editors enough structure to manage a growing body of content consistently.

Solution

Design and UX were created by Ultravirgo in collaboration with Phases. Phases delivered the UI implementation, development, Umbraco work, integrations, and deployment.

We built the site in Umbraco 13 on Umbraco Cloud, using reusable blocks and structured content types for areas such as project pages, tools, story sections, impact figures, maps, and partner content. Editors can assemble pages from established sections instead of creating layouts manually each time.

Umbraco Language Variants support English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese from the same platform. Leaflet is used for the interactive map, Umbraco Forms supports contact and application flows, and Mailchimp and Google Tag Manager were integrated for communications and reporting.

Frontend work also covered responsive imagery, lazy loading where appropriate, optimised media and SVGs, limited client-side dependencies, and vanilla JavaScript where suitable. Lighthouse, axe, and keyboard testing were completed during delivery.

Impact

CFF now has one place to present its projects, tools, application process, city stories, and programme information in the same visual language.

For visitors, the experience stays familiar whether they are looking through project work, reading about the support process, or searching the tools library. The interactive map adds another way to understand where CFF works and lets people reach project information geographically.

For editors, reusable blocks and structured content types reduce manual page work. New projects, resources, and updates can be published using the same established page sections, which helps the site stay consistent as new content is added.