About the client

Foster with Your Local Council is a national initiative that supports local authorities across England in recruiting and retaining foster carers. In the South West, 14 local authorities collaborated to create a shared digital platform — the South West Foster Hub — to promote fostering opportunities and manage enquiries efficiently.

The challenge

The South West region needed a unified system to improve how fostering enquiries were promoted, captured and managed. Challenges included:

• Outdated and inconsistent digital tools across councils.
• Limited ability to track enquiries through the early fostering journey.
• Heavy reliance on manual processes and spreadsheets to share referrals.
• No single marketing platform to showcase fostering opportunities across the region.
• Security and safeguarding concerns around sensitive personal data.

The councils, therefore, required a public-facing website to promote fostering and a secure online portal to manage enquiries and referrals across multiple authorities.

The solution

Hero developed a two-part solution for the South West region:

A public-facing brochure website:

• Built on WordPress with a user-friendly CMS for local teams.
• Promoting fostering opportunities with clear calls-to-action.
• Using contact forms integrated directly into the portal, ensuring all enquiries flow securely into the system.
• Designed with accessibility in mind (following WCAG 2.2 guidelines) and optimised for mobile.

A Foster Hub Portal for the team to use:

• Secure, role-based access for the Foster Hub team and local authority representatives.
• Tools to capture, store and manage enquiries from multiple sources (web, telephone or direct LA referrals).
• Structured conversation records to guide consistent enquiry handling.
• “Keep Warm” processes to maintain engagement with prospective carers.
• Allocation of enquiries to councils based on location, preferences and referral source.
• Functionality for councils to review, accept or reject enquiries.
• Manual export features for integration into each council’s existing case management system.
• Strong security controls including two-factor login, password hashing, SSL encryption and audit logging.

The impact

• A single, branded regional platform has been provided to promote fostering opportunities.
• Enquiry management has been streamlined across 14 councils, reducing duplication and manual data entry.
• Safeguarding and compliance have improved through secure data handling.
• Speed of allocation of enquiries to the right local authority has been boosted.
• Experience for the potential foster carer has been enhanced with a modern, accessible website and clear enquiry process.
• The foundation has been laid for future phases to expand reporting and integration with council systems.