Donation UX
Updating the online donation experience for positive impact on user experience and giving
My Role
Research, UX/UI, Prototyping, Testing, Dev handoff
Tools
Sketch, Photoshop, InVision, Flinto
Team
Director of UX, Senior UX/UI designer(that’s me!), Development, Digital Marketing, Copy
Timeline
Jam Session October 2017
Additional updates throughout 2018
The Challenge
Our Daily Bread Ministries is a global non-profit that is primarily supported through individual donations. As their digital audience began to rapidly grow, the need arose to update the donation experience for donors choosing to give online.
The existing experience was dated and lacking in information up front that may assist someone in their decision regarding how they would like to give to the ministry. It also did not assure users up front that their personal information would be fully secure. Additionally, it lacked information regarding other ways to give such as by check, annuity, estate gifts, or workplace giving.
I participated in a highly focused two-day "Jam Session" in order to design an improved donation experience for immediate review, development, and testing.
Original donation page, which buried key information on the second page
which many users never even saw.
The Goals
1. Reduce bounce rates and donation abandonment
2. Increase trust and confidence for secure transactions
3. Use donating as an opportunity to educate and build empathy
Research
Everyone involved completed reading and research assignments per our Senior Director of Digital Marketing so that we were able to enter our Jam Session well prepared and educated on industry best practices for donations and secure transactions.
We each performed an audit of the existing Our Daily Bread donation experience and completed a donation to have a full understanding of the process.
We also participated in donating through a number of other non-profit organizations and documenting the experience for each of them.
Doing all of this research prior to entering the Jam Session allowed us to hit the ground running with a shared knowledge base and to dive right in to identifying pain points and brainstorming solutions.
The “Jam Session”
Within these two days the design team created three different donation experiences for review, ultimately settling on 1 design after several rounds of modifications. I then prototyped the design in both Invision and Flinto for final review and presentation.
Because of the short time-frame of this project, our initial testing was done internally to validate the new designs. Internal stakeholders reviewed our prototypes and were asked to compare it to the existing experience. The new experience was approved and taken to development.
“Jam Session” in progress
Testing
After the new experience was developed, we A/B tested against the existing experience. Testing with users showed that the new experience was outperforming the old. During our test period, we saw visitor conversion rate increase by 45% and the average donation amount increase by $8. These results were simply based on an improved user experience for users already navigating to that page, no increased marketing efforts were made in an attempt to drive more users to that page.
Results after one year:
Donation rate increase of almost 70%
Annual donation amount increase of over 78%
This design gives admins the ability to easily change headline and background images to correspond with various causes and campaign efforts.
Additional Updates
Testing was done and informed changes have been made to the language and styling of the main donate button on odb.org, which is the primary way users are driven to the donate page.
Additional images and messaging were implemented on the page to coordinate with current campaign efforts and to consistently test effectiveness of various language and imagery.
New communication and payment confirmation emails were designed to coordinate with the experience and keep the user engaged in how their donation continues to make an impact.
I also worked continuously with development to improve the page template for various devices and screen sizes.
New donation page design which featured rotating images and messaging.