BUILDING A PEER-LED DONATION PAGE

UNDERSTANDING DONOR BEHAVIOUR

To figure out what motivates potential donors to give money to a cause, we conducted some baseline research into the behavioural science of donations. The main findings that would inform the strategy are:

USABILITY TESTING

The current website needed improvement. This conclusion was based on a heuristic analysis and comparisons to competitors’ websites. To further investigate this, I did some usability testing with five participants. All of them had an interest in various causes, were frequent internet users and – to understand how online donation behaviour might vary across generations – the age groups ranged from 21 to 67.

1. Trustmarks

   Official endorsements in the form of stamps and logos would help to increase trust in an unknown cause.
   5 out of 5
2. Colour

   More emotive visual representations, colour images and interactive elements to bring the concept to life.
   4 out of 5
3. Rewards

   The benefits of a membership weren’t apparent.
   4 out of 5
4. Cancellation options

   There were doubts about committing to a membership if the cancellation options couldn’t be found.
   3 out of 5
5. Testimonials

   Video testimonials giving a voice to the scholars would be more trustworthy than quotes and photographs (because anyone could just copy and paste these).
   2 out of 5
6. Amount selection

   A slider to increase or decrease the donation amount caused frustration because it loaded at a higher amount than the selected membership.
   2 out of 5
7. Friends

   If friends or someone they knew had mentioned the cause it would be more trustworthy.
   1 out of 5

DONOR VS BUYER JOURNEYS

Since payments are being made in each case, there are some obvious similarities between donation and e-commerce check-outs: the payment form should be simple, the information straight-forward and the process quick. But the motivation and perceived rewards are very different. According to Raise Donors, the emotional rush a buyer experiences happens after they have purchased a product, but a donor experiences it just before they make the donation – that’s why donation pages are so important.

Donation pages need to address the implicit emotional rewards of donating to a worthy cause: feeling like you're part of something great, being in the position of influencing someone’s happiness, and showing others that you’re doing good. For instance, a Neuroscience Marketing article mentions how, at least on a subconscious level, donating can be perceived as “mating fitness”. Having resources to spare indicates a good quality in a mate, and thus motivates the donor to show off his good deeds to others.

Whereas buyers often have a solid idea of what they want when they get to the product page, donors need more encouragement. Beyond eliciting the emotional rewards, donors need to be convinced of the cause’s trustworthiness and impact. Raise Donors explains how, as opposed to being a funnel with gravity working in its favour, the donor journey is “a mountain of many micro-decisions your donor has to make.”

USING SOCIAL PROOF THE RIGHT WAY

Social proof – a psychological and social phenomenon where people are known to copy the behaviour of others in an attempt to do the right thing – was coined by Robert Cialdini in 1984, and many charities leverage it to increase donations. Peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns, which encourage donors to take charge and share with their network, are evident examples. But social proof can also go wrong. If a cause publishes the amounts donors have donated in an attempt to influence others to match these amounts, it could also result in donors who may have wanted to donate more to donate less, especially if numbers are low at the beginning of the campaign. Therefore, the Neuroscience Marketing article points out, it’s better to use “broader social proof” – such as how many people have donated or how many people have been helped – and not publish donation amounts.

IS IT MANIPULATION?

The seeming conflict between how acting altruistically also has a what’s-in-it-for-me aspect came up in a lot of our group discussions. A touchy subject without a clear answer, our conclusion was that egotistic motivation doesn’t necessarily diminish the outcome (although in some situations it could). But for our case, we decided that making the donation process appealing increases the help learners get, resulting in an improved society, which benefits everyone.

We had to understand that the purpose of streamlining the donation journey is not to trick potential donors out of their money. It’s to ensure donors have all the necessary information when deciding whether to donate and minimal distraction once the decision is made. Although some online sources argued for UX dark patterns, such as removing the navigation on the donation page, we decided donors still need to be able to change their minds. In line with the marketing strategy our team came up with, it was also important to show that giving can be a fun, communal experience to do with friends and family.

THE STRATEGY

Crew for a Cause had already been making use of a “pod system”. To cover a learner’s school fees, a group of friends and family can club together to share the costs. This option wasn’t emphasised on their current website however, so – after doing the research into social proofing – our team decided to base the campaign on the creation of pod systems. Once this decision was made, we knew that we would no longer just be building a straightforward donation page with recurring membership options, but a pod page.

THE TARGET MARKET

To get people to start pods, the marketing team decided to split the target market into initiators and followers. The campaign would be aimed at the initiators who would start pods and get their friends and family, the followers, to join. Initiators are driven self-starters and outgoing personality types, interested in networking and social activity.

THE JOURNEY

The campaign the marketing team came up with would target initiators through various touchpoints: Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and search. It would be divided into four stages: intrigue, opinion, participation, and shareability. What’s important here is that in the participation phase, the initiator is informed through targeted social media posts about what a pod is and how to form it. So once they land on the homepage, they are likely to already have some background knowledge and are ready to take action. Here are the steps a pod starter might take from landing on the homepage to starting a pod:

CHALLENGES

Donating is not a straightforward process and considered “irrational” in a marketing context because there is no obvious gain or profit for the donor. There are implicit rewards though, but the donor may not be explicitly aware of them or openly admit to them. Making sure the pod page communicates these rewards without overtly stating them was one of the main challenges.

Further challenges included making sure all designers are on the same page because not everyone was part of the whole process. The target market’s age range was also very broad – from 20-50 – so finding an appropriate tone and style was another challenge our team had to tackle.

THE SOLUTION

Our digital solution: a peer-to-peer-fundraising-inspired personalised pod page for the initiator. At first we were considering incorporating a progress bar to show how much money still needs to be raised and a list of who has joined, but one of the copywriters suggested turning this into a pod diagram. At that stage the creative concept had progressed: the visual style, including the logo, would include circles to symbolise the coming together of a pod. So this made a lot of sense and we were able to incorporate our donor research nicely.

The pod diagram indicates to potential pod joiners that they are getting the opportunity to be part of something fun their friends are doing, while doing good. Seeing the scholar, and what is needed to help cover his school fees, elicits a feeling of having an influence over his well-being. The inclusion of a video testimonial further enhances this, and gives the learner a voice, answering usability-test participants’ call for authenticity. The pod learner is able to share his good deeds with his friends easily, with a purpose: to cover Ntando’s school fees.

IMPLEMENTING THE RESEARCH

Here are some examples of how each research finding was incorporated into the pod page design.

ITERATIONS

Our pod diagram developed from a progress bar and list of people who have donated, into an interactive hover animation.

The style of our website was created by one of the art directors in our group in order to fit the overall style of the campaign. We implemented style changes throughout the process.

RETROSPECTIVE

Because we were multiple designers working on one project, I feel like we should have started the rough SCAMPing process a bit earlier. This would have made it easier to ensure everyone was on the same page when it came to understanding why certain design decisions were made. Due to time constraints, some pages were quickly SCAMPed up when we had already started with the digital designs of other pages.

In future, I will also make sure that all designs are regularly shown to the strategy team. At one point we realised that, because the persona was changed, we had used stock images that don’t look like the persona’s friends for one of the animations, which the strategy team picked up on – luckily. This just meant that we had to redo the animation, which worked out fine in the end because we had an opportunity to include further improvements.

If we had more time, we would have done testing on the digital prototype and – depending on the results – perhaps refine the membership confirmation process. Currently, we just tried to keep it as simple as possible with best practices and include the payment options that were identified in a survey the marketing students conducted.

Working on a project with so many people from different disciplines can be a challenge, especially when you’re the only UX person – communication about how we do things sometimes gets lost or misinterpreted. Necessary, but sometimes lengthy, group discussions also meant there was less time in the day to work on designs.

But it was well-worth the learning curve. During our five-week stint, we got a lot done and getting direct feedback from group members of different disciplines massively improved our ideas and designs. I think we all were pretty impressed with what we managed to come up with in a short and stressful period of time.