Maximising donations for Salisbury’s biggest homeless charity
Services
- Digital Strategy
- User Experience
- Design
- Backend Development
Brief
Alabaré is an inspirational charity providing support and housing for hundreds of vulnerable, homeless and marginalised people across the South. They partnered with us to create a new website that would help increase awareness of its support and services and, crucially, drive donations, focusing on an improved user experience for their multiple audiences. By improving and focusing on the supporter journeys, the new site will enable Alabaré to increase income and provide much-needed funding to combat rising numbers of homeless.
APPROACH
As a charity with multiple audiences, 12 in total, Alabaré’s current website was extensive. So, understanding each audience and their unique relationship to the charity is integral to the discovery phase. One of our favourite ways to categorise and condense information is through an interactive, co-design workshop with the client and Halo’s UX and Design teams. This helped us to understand all their audiences and how they help them, ensuring a smooth journey for all.
As with all charities, Alabaré’s website has a dual purpose ‒ to help the supporters and volunteers to engage and donate, and to provide support to its service users. We wanted these two functions to work seamlessly for their audiences, so we focused on creating a smooth donation journey, a clear event information page, and a comprehensive emergency page that makes reaching out easy and quick.
Having worked with and for some of the UK’s biggest charities, we understand that nothing is possible without generous donations. So a key objective for the site was an intuitive, quick and secure donation journey. We want to make it easy for people to donate in different ways, including one-off and regular donations, so we set about evolving and improving Alabaré’s existing donation form, simplifying it and styling it to be more user-friendly. Plus, with integrated goal conversion tracking, we can review and continue to optimise the donation journey for maximum income generation.
APPROACH CONTINUED
From reviewing Alabaré’s website analytics, we knew that the emergency page is the most visited page after the homepage. So we ensured the page is accessible from the main navigation of the website via an eye-catching red button, and by making the primary navigation ‘sticky’, the button is always visible.
With service users spanning veterans, homeless, parent and baby, mental health and young people, the emergency page needed to cater for all simply, whilst giving each a breadth of information specific to their need, and their location. We integrated a filter for each audience, which pulls in relevant information including local support services, partnership organisations, local council details, Alabare’s drop-in centres and self-referral links.
Like donations, events are a brilliant way to support any charity. Alabaré holds a number of events throughout the year, so allowing people to easily search for and find out about them is integral to increasing participation and support. We improved the page with more structured content, filters, styling and a calendar to allow supporters to find and sign up for local events they’re interested in. Again, we integrated this into goal conversion tracking, allowing it to be reviewed and optimised.
