Charity online donation platforms haven't developed at the speed of ecommerce sites. So, when Al Mustafa Welfare Trust approached us with a website with a bad user experience and terrible conversion rate and asked us to improve what they had we knew it was time to stop doing the wrong things righter and move the industry forwards instead.
Al Mustafa Welfare Trust had an engaged community and a strong brand image, but their website wasn't usable, and their loyal donators struggled to complete a donation online. Their site had an overly simplistic navigation, a convoluted design, poor mobile experience and an off the shelf donation platform that did its job but not much more. They needed an improvement across the board to increase conversions and create a website that fit their brand.
The needs of charity websites are quite simple, they need to be able to efficiently and succinctly tell stories of charity projects, and then allow the user to quickly and simply make a donation. Therefore, as is true with all websites, it was imperative that we placed user experience at the forefront of the project.
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We knew that in the charity sector, anywhere between 70% and 80% of donations can come from users on mobile devices. Creating a mobile friendly site became our number one priority. We ensured that the UX is as seamless on mobile or tablet as it is on desktop.
Al Mustafa Welfare Trust, like too many charities, were relying on an off the shelf solution that worked for donations but was designed for a more traditional ecommerce site. We installed our donation platform, built specifically for the charity sector.
Whilst they've been around for quite a while, carts are a pretty new concept when it comes to charity websites. Previously charities assumed the user journey though the site was much simpler, and the need for a cart was non–existent. Adding a donation cart has resulted in an increased conversion rate and a higher average order value.
The client wanted to encourage donors to donate to more than one cause at a time, to simplify the process for users. We created a donation experience that utilizes a popup slider to ensure the cart is easily accessible on any page including directly within cause pages.
Al Mustafa Welfare Trust had several loyal donors who had set up recurring donations. As a part of the site transition we ensured that these recurring payments were transferred seamlessly on the new platform.
Our bespoke CMS enables the client to completely customize the upsell causes promoted through the cart. This allows them to encourage donations for the most urgent campaigns through upsells.
The platform separates the check-out process into the most appropriate sections for charity donations.
In 2018, the website has a conversion rate of 3.8% - more than triple the industry average.
The main navigation menu on the site covers most of the screen when used, and in doing so it makes it incredibly simple for a user to find the appeal or information that they are looking for quickly. Al Mustafa Welfare Trust, like many charities, run several appeals simultaneously, the menu is therefore a valuable asset on the site.
With numerous campaigns running simultaneously, Charity websites can be difficult to navigate. To negate this issue we built a powerful search function that identifies campaigns and projects that the searcher may be looking for and presents popular campaigns to help simplify the search.
With so many campaigns running at any one time, we needed to differentiate between them to improve the user experience interface and help extend the brand look from their marketing collateral onto their online presence.
Zakat requires Muslims who own wealth above a specified threshold to donate a portion of their wealth (Nisab) to charity. Nisab needs to be calculated every year – on Al Mustafa Welfare Trust site, we built a donation platform that calculates your Nisab for you.
Many charities experience peak times of the year – periods in which donations and site visitors increase significantly. For Al Mustafa Welfare Trust this falls within the month of Ramadan. Sites in this situation have two choices, pay for full server capabilities year-round, wasting money in months in which it's not needed, or pay or a lesser server performance and risk down time in peak periods - impacting user experience and satisfaction.
We host the site on a scalable server which means that the client does not have to pay for full a capacity server all year round and server capabilities scale up in peak times ensuring they can cope with a sudden influx of traffic.