UNICEF Aotearoa Website
“Seeing what other people have donated and how that translates into children being helped kind of restores my faith in humanity a little.”
The project
UNICEF impacts children's lives all around the world in profound ways and is more effective than any other children's charity - having the largest scale, reach and impact of any child rights organisation globally.
Our founder and CTO, Danu Abeysuriya, has been a life-long supporter of the charity, and personally ran a fundraiser in 2021 to raise over $70,000 for their COVAX programme. This was the start of a fantastic relationship between RUSH and UNICEF Aotearoa, which brought some of the digital experience challenges the charity were facing to light.
We started with a question: how might we create a new UNICEF Aotearoa website which helps New Zealanders build an empathetic connection to UNICEF's work around the world, and increase the number of online donations by providing an engaging and innovative donor experience in a digital-first world?
Expertise
Accessibility
Experience Auditing
Frontend Development
Information Architecture
Research
UI Design
UX Design
< 24
hours to get an appeal page live, so money reaches ground aid faster
40%
increase in website views since the new site has gone live
80%
higher peak in donations to the Libya Flood Emergency appeal than anticipated
Together, the UNICEF and RUSH teams began with a collaborative Inception workshop and Discovery canvas, creating a shared understanding of the business problem we’re solving and the context we’re operating in.
User Journey & Story Mapping workshops allowed us to empathise with human needs, market context, technical possibilities, and get inspired to fuel ideation. UX Benchmarking and Analogous Inspiration of the current UNICEF Aotearoa website donor UX against other local and international charity organisations’ websites was conducted, and we gathered inspiration from digital products in thematically relevant spaces.
We reviewed the Information Architecture to redesign the structure of the website to be intuitive with clear pathways for jobs to be done, and then built out a concept prototype which was user-tested within target audiences. This was then refined into five responsive web page templates supporting key donor touchpoints.
"Our partnership with RUSH continues to develop in a really positive way, with our website refresh project uncovering many opportunities to improve our supporter engagement. The RUSH team are an awesome group to work with, are super communicative, and I am very confident we’ll exceed the outcomes we set ourselves at the beginning of this journey."
Help an unfamiliar audience build trust
To steer our solution with a user-focussed approach, we created a user type matrix representing the groups that make up our target audience of first-time individual donors. In reviewing the user type matrix, we decided to focus the strategy on migrating 'The Untapped' audience (those with low awareness of UNICEF and low motivation to donate) to 'The Champions' (those with high awareness of UNICEF and high motivation to donate).
By enabling this shift through human centred design, the new website addresses the gaps necessary to bring all user types on the journey to becoming a UNICEF donor.
Make it simple, easy and accessible
Our second design challenge was to provide the UNICEF team with a flexible solution that enables them to continually evolve their website and update dynamic content without relying on outside expertise.
Working in a highly collaborative way, RUSH’s design and product teams created comprehensive design specs and content guidelines. The UNICEF development team led the build of dynamic, modular ‘slices’ that UNICEF content editors can use to build beautiful pages quickly and easily in Prismic CMS.
Explore their work
The new UNICEF website breathes life into the organisation's values, highlighting the scale and reach of its impact for children worldwide in a style and language to offer a uniquely interactive online donation experience that better visualises how donation money is used to help.
Ready to make better happen?
