Launched: IWF Annual Report

The Internet Watch Foundation is the UK charity responsible for finding and removing images and videos of child sexual abuse from the internet. Every year the IWF produces an extensive annual report, in which they share statistics, highlight trends, and present insights.

The report serves as a practical resource for anyone in the area of child safety and online safety, to help inform their valuable work. It is a tool to help influence policy and law makers, and an opportunity for members to see how their donations have helped. Further, it is an acquisition piece, used to encourage new members to support the IWF's crucial work.

To date, budget and logistical constraints have limited the reach of the IWF report. Over the last nine years this report has been produced in printed format and distributed to a select number of key members. This format does not enable members to make the best use of the report, and there are also concerns that once distributed, reports are often shelved or discarded.

The team at the IWF wanted to change this. Their goal was to create a web application that will help make this report as accessible, as versatile, and as portable as possible. Working in collaboration with Honest Ideas, Bad Dinosaur designed and developed a web application that puts IWF data in the pockets of politicians, policy makers, law enforcement agencies, support workers, charities, and everyone working in this area.

We built the Annual Report as a progressive web app (PWA) to allow users to save the app to their device homescreens. The web app is also available as a traditional web app via browser across all devices. The following technologies were used to create the IWF Annual Report: Microsoft ASP.NET, a free, cross-platform and open source framework for building web apps and services with .NET and C#, and Amazon Web Services, which offers reliable, scalable, and inexpensive cloud computing services.

This project was a collaboration between the IWF, their marketing agency Honest Ideas, and Bad Dinosaur. It was our first time working alongside another agency on a project and we really enjoyed the process. Generally we work directly with the client, but we quickly adapted to a new way of working and really enjoyed working with Susie and the team at Honest Ideas.

Lead Designer at Bad Dinosaur, Finlay Muir, said:

“This is a big one for us at Bad Dinosaur and I'm personally very proud to have led on this project. Susie Hull and the brilliant team at Honest Ideas deserve credit for their bold vision, direction and fantastic level of collaboration throughout the project. Its a difficult subject to discuss and at times work on, but we believe this powerful report will help further highlight the brilliant work of the IWF in their mission to eradicate child sexual abuse online.”

Account Director at Honest Ideas, Susie Hull, said:

“It has been fantastic to collaborate with Finlay Muir and the team at Bad Dinosaur as they helped bring our vision to life, moving a traditional print report to an online web app, which has enabled people to easily access the stats […] We hope this report and campaign raises awareness of this worldwide issue and the work that IWF do to remove millions of images and videos showing the sexual abuse of children.”

We’d like to say thank you to Susie and the team at Honest Ideas for being such a pleasure to work with. And we’d also like to thank Emma and the team at the IWF for taking the time to share the IWF story with us. We are full of admiration for the difficult and important work that the IWF does, and we hope that this Annual Report helps to make the internet a safer place for children.

If you would like to donate to the Internet Watch Foundation you can do so here, and if you'd like to subscribe to their newsletter, you can do so here.