Case Study

Brief

Action for Children, Britain’s largest children’s charity, has launched my.actionforchildren.org.uk and put supporters in control of how their donations are spent.

The move comes after the charity asked people across the country what they thought about supporting charities that helped neglected and vulnerable children in their communities. The results were conclusive:

• People are concerned about vulnerable children in their community
• People want to give to local projects helping local children
• People want to see evidence that their money makes a difference
• People want to feel connected with programmes in the community

As a result, Action for Children commissioned 9web and Open Fundraising to completely overhaul the way it raises money and involves supporters in its work.

Strategy

Our approach was to look closely at the target donors and to identify what was important to them. This enabled us to put focus on an intuitive search function, which would help to locate results by location, (child) age group, type of item requested and area of work.

Rather than having wireframes dictate how the designs should shape up, 9web’s IA effort worked hand-in-hand with the creative team at Open Fundraising to make sure the Action for Children brand was closely followed, without losing the important messaging and functionality of the site.

Execution

With the urgency of launching the site early in 2011, the delivery of the website is the result of a huge collaborate effort from a number of different organizations: 9web built all of the web functionality using the Drupal open-source CMS as the underlying technology – as well as driving the integration with the existing secure payment system set up for Action for Children by Baigent Digital.

Open Fundraising helped coordinate the individual asks from the many project centres across the UK as well as creating copy for each item and project on the site.

Last – and by no means least – Action for Children worked extremely hard to coordinate all the supporting off-line activity, as well as dedicating a huge team to usability testing ahead of the launch.

Darren Appleby, Managing Director of 9web says, “I'm hugely proud of the effort from the 9web team to deliver this project in such a short space of time – everyone has gone above and beyond to build a fantastic website. It’s also been a huge privilege to work with our peer organizations to meet a common goal – everyone involved has worked extremely hard to make My Action for Children happen.”

Results

The website was launched on time and to budget and has been extremely well received both by the sector and by the donors and projects themselves – donations are already mounting up. By today’s standards, surely an indicator of success is a Stephen Fry “tweet” and the resulting spike in traffic. Praise indeed.