Walk4BrainCancer
New Digital Platform
New CMS
Uplifted Fundraising Capability
Content strategy
Content production
Walk4BrainCancer is the major fundraising event for the Cure Brain Cancer Foundation (CBCF). Since its launch in 2013, Walk4BrainCancer has grown into a national movement drawing thousands of Australians from around the country each year. The Walk’s success has contributed to the Foundation’s investment of over $30 million in brain cancer research. As part of the digital transformation of Cure Brain Cancer’s digital assets, the Walk4BrainCancer, a separate fundraising website, was overhauled to improve the fundraising experience, including integrating new payment systems and personalisation of community organised fundraising walks.
The Challenge
Walk4BrainCancer is the largest fundraising activity for the foundation.
Core tenets of the project included revitalising its digital presence, engaging with its wider community, and enhancing touchpoints to create a best-in-class user experience. Streamlining fundraising and showing progress against targets was key, as was an effective, straight-through payment processing platform, enabling tax-deductible receipts to donors and the sale of merchandise.
Most importantly, the Walk4Brain Cancer website needed to be highly personalised, as the events are a mix of organisation run, and grassroots community organised walks.
Discovery
Spending time with the key stakeholders to understand what the website needed to achieve: the types of content and fundraising events needed as well as how the back-end should work. Using sites from across the same sector, we looked to benchmark what a best-in-class experience would be, with considerations around information architecture, accessibility standards, content design and how the new brand could be applied.
As part of the discovery process, user personas and journeys were developed. These were designed to help structure an accessible information architecture and assist in the development of content.
In the not-for-profit space, community is at the heart of their fundraising. It was important to engage with the community to ensure the prototypes met or exceeded their expectations and experience for what each interaction should be like. Face-to-face interactions and high touch personal communications are central to the success of the community. Donors and the brain cancer community started to show an increase in the preference for online access to the foundation. However, it was essential to make sure the experience online was both personalised and meaningful. Testing showed that the new design and IA made it easy to navigate and the design and brand, whilst fresh, were elements that retained the essence of what the brain cancer community expected from the foundation.
Developing a community-focused digital platform was essential
With so much rich content from suppporters and the broader community, along with the calendar of fundraising, providing incredible community engagement opportunities, the design consideration for the user interface was to provide a simple way for visitors to navigate the site.
The personas developed during discovery were central to developing a secondary menu, displaying an intent-based directory. A primary navigation bar provided standard page categories and information. Each user intent was assigned a colour from the new brand identity, helping to be a visual bookmark. Meta navigation was added to promote standalone campaign and event pages.
Guidance on the photography style from a digital perspective was considered to enable imagery to complement the web UI, all the while delivering on the vibrancy of the brand.
User testing
Iteration of the design
eCommerce donation capabilities, educational guides,
events calendars, and customer portals for users to log in and see their donations, events and fundraisers with the charity. CBCF has a well-engaged community of active supporters, and we developed an individual and team-based fundraising system. When groups of people fundraise for a specific cause or campaign, they can create individual shareable pages to promote their participation, collect donations, and have the amount contributed to the team page. As the individual or team gains traction, they earn badges and celebrate their success on the leaderboard.
Other considerations
Impact
This digital transformation project changed how CBCF interacts with their diverse community. From donors, fundraising groups, scholarship, thought leadership and research. It has reimagined how the organisation shares the stories of their community.
There are now more ways to engage and contribute to CBCF, from automated donation processes and on-demand resources to automated nurture communications.
