More people are diagnosed with cancer in Yorkshire than in most other parts of England and, sadly, more people die. Yorkshire Cancer Research exists to change this.
The charity found us via our white label donations platform, DonateFlow, which they adopted for their own online donations. They were impressed with our service and knowledge, so when their website rebuild went out to tender, they made sure to invite a response from us. We were delighted to win the job.
DonateFlow has been a really valuable tool. It’s a really cost effective solution that immediately improved our donor experience. The team are also incredibly helpful and knowledgeable. So much so that we’ve partnered with them for a full website project.
An urgent and substantial challenge
We were tasked with replacing a tired and unwieldy website and content management system with a user centric platform. The new website had to speak to multiple audiences, streamline all sorts of processes, integrate third party systems, manifest a new brand, and be built for future flexibility and growth. It also had to support fundamental changes in the charity’s remit, which was moving from research-only, to providing front-line services, too.
This might sound like a lot. But as is often the case, the work on our side paled against the backdrop of the charity’s own stated mission: giving more life to Yorkshire.
Research to create a people-centred approach
An intensive discovery phase identified four core audiences: individual givers, event participants, researchers, and volunteers. We mapped key user journeys for personas in each audience, making sure that all features and functions of the website supported their needs. Discovery also identified the wide range of content the website needed to support. We worked with the team at Yorkshire Cancer Research to organise everything in a logical framework, again keeping the website’s most important visitors central to all decisions.
Extraordinary flexibility and context-aware layouts
The breadth of the content requirements identified in Discovery, coupled with the competing needs of our four core audiences, called for a serious response. And in the end, the need for flexibility across the site informed the foundations of the redesign.
We knew that different sections of the site would have vastly different content, so we developed a design system to adapt to that need. We called this approach “context aware”, which, in short, helps all pages look great, no matter what content options they utilise. However the team at Yorkshire Cancer Research build up pages, using any combination of text, image, side-bars, page indexes, calls-to-action and so on, the design will respond automatically, making each layout appear balanced and visually appealing.
Supercharging online donations
When we started working on the rebuild of the website, Yorkshire Cancer Research had been using DonateFlow to collect donations for a couple of years. So we had a good benchmark to work from. We carried out extensive research into how and why people gave to the charity.
It was encouraging to find that 95% of DonateFlow users rated their experience Excellent or Good. But we didn’t stop there — we knew more insight would help us improve online giving even more.
Responding directly to our research, we overhauled the giving experience:
- We made it easier for people to enter their own donation amount
- We optimised for one-off donations
- We reviewed the suggested amounts (raising them incrementally, to match what people chose to give)
- We made Direct Debits the default option for recurring payments
- We promoted suggested donation amounts for monthly payments (the majority of regular donors picked from suggested amounts, where the opposite was true for one-off donations)
These nudge-tactics do make a difference. But the biggest change was giving Yorkshire Cancer Research the ability to create campaign and donation pages at will. They can now customise their main donation page according to seasonal messaging, or create ad hoc pages to support fundraising events, specific campaigns and so on.
The charity now has 100% control over content, layout and functionality of donations via the website. The result of which has been a 354% increase in donation frequency, from the standalone DonateFlow page, to the full integration on the website.
354%
Increase in donation frequency
95%
Users rating their experience Excellent or Good
100%
Control over donations content and functions
An ongoing relationship
Yorkshire Cancer Research continues to evolve, fund more research, influence national policy, and deliver services of its own.
The Active Together campaign is a good case-in-point. The service supports the physical and mental fitness of people in Yorkshire as they prepare for, undergo and recover from cancer treatment. We created a section for Active Together on the website that acts like a microsite, with resources, service centre index, testimonials and information for healthcare professionals. It has an independent navigation, content structure and contact details, but is administered through the same CMS as everything else, making it easier to manage and maintain.
Regardless of what we do next with Yorkshire Cancer Research, we’re very happy to be with them on their journey to change Yorkshire’s cancer story, for good.
Charity and not for profit digital transformation Speak to John
