40 Hour Famine is World Vision’s most significant fundraising campaign in their annual marketing calendar. At the beginning of 2020, the organisation wanted to move more of the fundraising activity from offline booklets and envelopes of cash to the digital Peer-to-Peer Fundraising platform.
To achieve this, it was identified that the onboarding journey and fundraising tools needed an updated user experience and design.
The target audience was broad, ranging from school-age children between 10-18 years old to teachers, churchgoers, and workplace teams. Fundraisers can create their own individual fundraising page, or join a team, such as their school or church. This created a complex onboarding journey with over 20 possible paths for the end-user.
When New Zealand entered COVID-19 Alert Level 4, we suddenly faced a greater challenge as all schools, churches, and most workplaces were closed. World Vision’s fundraising reps couldn’t promote 40 Hour Famine as they traditionally would: presenting at school assemblies or meeting with school staff and churches.
As the campaign had run for many years, we analysed support requests and analytics from previous years to identify key optimisation opportunities. We also conducted product research, reviewing best practice examples from other not-for-profit organisations.
For design, we ran our 5-day Co-Design Sprint:
Day 1: Understand
We established a shared understanding of problems/key opportunities to improve the end-to-end experience for fundraisers.
Day 2: Sketch
We facilitated design-thinking exercises for everyone to share their ideas, resulting in different possible solutions for problems identified.
Day 3: Decide
We agreed as a group which solutions to focus on, and key questions we want answered from user testing. Anonymous voting created a heatmap of the best ideas in the room, allowing everyone an equal say.
Day 4: Prototype
Using Sketch, Abstract, and InVision, our designers created a high-fidelity interactive prototype in 8 hours, designing with real data. Our refined design-ops process allowed multiple designers to work quickly and simultaneously.
Day 5: Test
We conducted one-on-one user testing sessions with participants who represented our target audience.
Sketch and Zeplin were used for a scalable digital style-guide, ensuring design consistency. Abstract was used for full source-control, version history, and internal design reviews through the iterations.
The Peer-to-Peer Fundraising Platform was redesigned and relaunched in Q1 2020, offering a world-class digital experience on any device.
As the multiple onboarding paths created challenges for end-users and contributed to lower conversion rates, the new design abstracted away complex logic, simplifying onboarding. It enables personalised fundraising pages, fundraiser updates and donor comments, connecting fundraisers with donors, driving engagement, and encouraging donations.
Online donations are updated in real-time, all of which are tracked on individual and team-level leaderboards, designed for a gamified experience and celebrating top fundraisers.
During a time of unprecedented challenge for World Vision and their supporters when other non-digital channels were unavailable, the platform achieved:
60% conversion rate for onboarding.
Increase in average online donation value.
Over NZD$1.1 million raised in total
The record number of donations will go towards some of the world’s most vulnerable children and supporting climate-vulnerable communities in Malawi.