With the arrival of GDPR, CARE International UK faced a challenge in how best to provide their supporters with a way to manage their contact preferences for SMS, post, telephone and email.
However they also needed to balance this with a way to reduce the number of supporters unsubscribing, as this would have a serious impact on their ability to run fundraising appeals in times of crisis.
This project posed an interesting contradiction: the need to provide great usability to supporters (so they could easily control their communications preferences), whilst limiting the number of people who reduce their points of contact.
Putting UX first
Our solution was to focus on user experience. Our preference centre would change the way someone felt about CARE, to strengthen (or restore) the love between supporter and charity and thus reduce the desire for users to cut contact.
Our ethos was that “the message would be the site”; the utility and functionality of the preference centre would be important, but the preference centre – now renamed a Supporter Hub – would in its design convey that the supporters have real impact and are valued by CARE.
Designing for emotion
An initial design sprint put emotions first and foremost: logging in to the Supporter Hub reveals a full-screen, feel-good video. Users then transition to a series of tabbed pages, presenting their personal data and communications preferences alongside positive imagery of CARE staff delivering aid, as well as information about the impact of their support.
For the build we used Engaging Networks’ new Supporter Hub functionality.
A typical Engaging Networks hub would only consist of one page, but our design used tabs to extend beyond the limits of a one pager, creating the feel of a multi-page microsite and allowing space to grow the Hub in the future.
Launch and the onset of GDPR
This was a rapid turnaround project with one sprint each of design and build. Launched comfortably in time for May 2018 and the impact of GDPR, CARE International UK have been very happy with the results:
“The Supporter Hub was such an important project for us. Our brief was to give our supporter’s greater control of their contact preferences whilst also showing them how much their support means to us. Outlandish have provided the perfect technical and creative solution to deliver just that.
“I particularly like the way Outlandish listened and worked collaboratively with us to ensure that their solution was the right one and I felt the success of this project meant as much to them as it did to us.
“The end product not only looks great but was quick to deliver (a key part of the brief), has scope to grow in future and is technically practical for us to manage and maintain. I’m excited to work with Outlandish again in future and wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them.”
Becki Young, Supporter Development Manager, CARE International UK
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
