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Client Stories  - The Kickstart Project

Kickstart Project

Kickstarting real change by maximising a charity’s reach

The Kickstart Project Inc is committed to helping Kenyans to build a brighter future through education, health and sustainable solutions. The Melbourne based non-for-profit was founded by Esther Rijk who developed a sponsorship program that is transforming the future for kids in Kenya. With a passion for driving positive change, The Kickstart Project wanted to develop a website that enabled them to take their message global.

“We struggled to communicate our projects to potential supporters in Kenya because we had nowhere for them to go to find out about what we do, how our programs work and how donations are spent in Kenya.” - Esther Rijk, founder of The Kickstart Project

The organisation recognised it was the perfect time to expand the impact and reach of their brand. At the same time, developing a solution that minimised admin costs so that their team could continue focusing on their mission, was essential. Our challenge was set.

Look at our solution for Kickstart

Identifying the audience

To implement a successful solution, we needed to define the main audiences likely to use Kickstart’s website so that we could develop a solution that met their needs, exceeded their expectations and spoke their language. We also needed to predict who would gravitate towards and use the site upon the implementation of its online ordering system.

Given this was Kickstart’s first venture into the online space, we knew we were starting from scratch so we ran workshops to understand the organisation’s current demographics and donation modes. Comprehensive competitor research was undertaken to better understand what other charities were doing and how we could position Kickstart’s online presence. Our approach saw us identifying how we could target users to support Kickstart simply by making a donation.

“Younger people in particular prefer to make a donation online compared to making a bank transfer or cash donation. We’ve received fantastic feedback about the look and flow of the website and people have commented about how easy it is to navigate through.” - Esther

UX research

Our challenge was to design a user experience (UX) that was so good and seamless, that Kickstart’s core audience wouldn’t forget it anytime soon. We knew what had already been done before and we didn’t want to replicate what was already out there. So we identified best industry practices, did our homework in regards to the industry’s visual tone and what its competitors were offering online before developing a Sitemap and wireframes. Our mission was to research what was already out there and then raise the bar.

Design

With the UX research done and dusted, it was time to design a solution that catered specifically to Kickstart’s requirements. We broke the process down into bite-size chunks where we looked at:

Photography selection
Social psychology proves that people are more compliant when they feel they’re being watched (it’s very Big Brother of us, we know). To maximise the number of donations generated by Kickstart’s site, we strategically placed photos of children’s eyes staring straight back at the site’s users to increase donation acquisition rates.

Logo use
Based on our team’s advice, Kickstart agreed to a logo redesign that enhances the organisation’s commercial look and feel. The new logo creates a powerful statement and leads to a trusted brand experience.

Consistency
At the core of effective UX experience is consistency and that’s why we’ve used the same colours, fonts and placement of various elements throughout to ensure Kickstart’s site provides a consistent user experience.

Speaking our target market’s language
Upon researching the organisation’s competitors, we determined the languaging that was familiar to the not-for-profit sector to ensure Kickstart’s key messaging spoke to its target audience.

Kickstart Project

Innovation

Minimising admin costs was one of our key goals when developing Kickstart’s website, which inspired us to implement systems that would make a set and forget donation solution possible. We knew the organisation already enabled its supporters to make recurring donations so that they could make monthly donations for a desired amount. So we built a solution that allows Kickstart to offer their donors multiple options to make contributing to a child’s education, as simple as possible. Now, donors can make contributions on a monthly, quarterly or yearly basis. These recurring payments are set and forget, equating to less admin costs and giving Kickstart the ability to scale with ease as the charity grows.

What an amazing, passionate, generous and skilled team of professionals! It has been such a pleasure to work with the Woven team over the past year. They have embraced The Kickstart Project so wholeheartedly and have put so much work into creating a website that would provide structure, personality and professionalism to our charity. We are so grateful for their patience and mentoring throughout the process to create the website as this was an area that we were very unfamiliar with.” - Esther

Impact

Kickstart’s new Avenue website is intuitive, enabling donations to be placed online with ease. The charity has recorded a 10% increase in subscribers to their email database and are confident this will continue to grow once the site has been up and running for longer. They’re also taking on twice the number of student sponsorships in January 2018 than they did the previous year. In total, 92% of donations made to Kickstart, go directly to the important work they’re doing in Kenya.

“This year has seen our biggest increase in donations and sponsorship sign-ups to date and we are extremely excited! The website is a big contributor to this increase in support as we’re finally able to streamline and simplify the sponsorship sign-up process."

In total, 92% of donations made to Kickstart, go directly to the important work they’re doing in Ken-ya. We’ve continued working alongside Kickstart to improve their systems and over the last year, Pronto has assisted the organisation to qualify all tax deductions. This sees an additional 6.5% of donations going to another charity, One Heart Challenge, leaving only 1.5% of any donation going towards admin costs and SecurePay, their payment gateway.

“Being able to promote our tax deductibility status online gives us more credibility to new potential donors and sponsors. The Kickstart Project has become a much stronger and more credible brand through the development of the website and our tax deductibility status."