Raising the bar for online donations

Context

Officeworks prides itself on supporting important causes in communities across Australia, donating millions each year via corporate and customer giving. Owing to the nature of their products and services, they have a particular affinity toward educational programs and groups.

If you know anything about me, you'll know that any charitable cause is something right up my alley. I was only too happy to help drive more donations for The Smith Family Back to School 2021 campaign.

Challenge

COVID-19, that old chestnut. Like so many businesses, it was posing challanges to a number of services. In particular, it wasimpacting cause campaigns due to customers not being in store and not actively using the tools available to them to donate online.

My role

Leading the UX design, I focussed on research, wireframing, copywriting and prototyping the project. Whilst working alongside a UI designer, I also provided input and options into interface design as well. I also led the project, with support from our BA and delivery manager, keeping stakeholders involved and up to date.

Rapid prototyping

The best way to describe this design process is rapid. With only a few weeks to get things up and running, competing with time for other projects and Christmas holidays. Our process involved:

• Understand and breakdown the business challenge
• Formulate some valid options for moving forward that hypothesised improved outcomes
• Conduct early and frequent feedback and update sessions with stakeholders (including tech, product and business) to keep everyone aligned
• Define an approach, wireframe and prototype it, and then chunk it into iterative options

Kick-off

Discovery was quick off the mark and already the constraints were showing - short turnaround and as with many well-intentioned requests, we were being asked to complete a determined solution. I worked closely with our stakeholders to recommend we complete some discvoery and reseatrch first and make sure there isn't something better we can do within the same constraints.

The core challenge to figure out was how we could drive up online donations while customers were attending stores less. Stores typically drove the majority of donations and they felt customers missed the social interaction from that.

Discovery & proposal

With our stakeholders backing the new plan, and excited to be getting some attention from designers, I completed a short round of secondary research. And I found some really compelling data.

• People overwhelmingly want to understand a charity’s mission and how it spends the proceeds first.
• People don't want to feel pushed or bullied if prompted for larger donations.
• Social medi reach generally correlates with higher donation totals due to social sharing.
• Established design patterns show that people want to have instant gratification.

I therefore proposed we build a social sharing feature into our exisiting checkout flow for donations. I also coupled this with a vision of what future online donations could look like, including augmented reality and personalised messaging for customers.

Prototypes & build

There was overwhelming support for this solution and therefore prototypes were built very quickly. I concepted, copywrote, and prototyped the donation landing page, checkout, post-checkout, contact email and social share content.

A 790% increase in donations and new work in the pipeline is a pretty good outcome. Due to the success of this "quick" enhancement, other work was waiting for us for the next donation campaign (this time with a little more time).