Landing Page
Highlighting NPO's mission
Donate Page
Donor Dashboard

CAD - TOD

Helping increase an organization's donations footprint through tangible & organic methods.

Inspiration

We were inspired by our NPO's mission that facilitates a new lease of life to victims of domestic violence & abuse around the Arizona area. The problem Control Alt Delete faced was the fact that they struggled to get a steady stream of donations. Our job was to mitigate this issue by developing a solution to make donations more tangible.

Our Solution

PD = Potential Donor

We thought of multiple solutions for this problem but decided to focus our efforts on the one place that potential donors spend the most time on -- the website. It's a large playing field that, if done right, can be used to tip a person's decision to donate in our favour.

Our project addresses the need of getting tangible and organic donors. It can be divided into 2 parts:

We want to get in donors (tangible)
We want to retain those donors (organic)

Point 1

For point 1, we decided the best way we could accomplish this was to make it immediately obvious to the PD what our NPO's mission is, and how they can help the cause by donating some money. We've also made major UI changes to the website to make it more inviting to a user (research shows that people are put off by dead-looking sites which decreases the likelihood of donations).

A large driving factor behind our decision of Point #1 is that we recognize that many people are extremely busy and don't have the time to funnel through a site looking for the points they need in order to vet that the organization is actually doing real work and not just another scam on the market. It turns out, in research conducted in Canada, nearly 1 in 3 Canadians say they don't trust the authenticity of non-profits.

Our process accomplishes the following:

Provides transparency to a PD --> Encourages wise spending of donations --> Spurs more donations

Trust is extremely important for users when it comes to donating money. Our first point works toward that goal -- we want to build trust between a PD and our NPO.

Point 2

Once we have got in a donor, we want to show the donor that their money hasn't just got locked in a black box and hidden away forever. The biggest point that donors would want to know is how much of an impact their money has had. This initial assessment will be the make-or-break factor in deciding whether they should invest their money in that particular NPO. If we cannot convince a donor of their impact at this crucial point, we risk losing them from donating again.

Our solution is to provide donors with an interactive dashboard that they can use to view their total donation, the lives that they've had an impact on, and a chart that shows their donation progress over the months. Our hope is that when donors see this impact in real-time, they'll be much more likely to donate more frequently (and with larger sums of money).

On a sidenote, we had also considered fundraising as a possibility, but that would only result in more one-off donors as opposed to the long-term, organic donors we were hoping to get.

How we built it

We decided to build our entire project using WordPress. This was a natural choice considering that our NPO also uses WordPress to power their current website. This drastically reduces the amount of time and effort needed to implement this solution. Plus, data can easily be imported/exported via the WordPress backend.

Challenges we ran into

Time was definitely a big challenge for us. Between the three of us, we barely had much time to work on this project due to personal and professional commitments. We would have definitely liked to have added a few more features + worked on improving the UI frontend a tad more.

What's next for CAD-TOD?

Add social-media shareable links on the donor dashboard which would allow the user to share the impact they've had. This would allow others to potentially get inspired and donate to our org.
Update the donor dashboard to dynamically generate data in real-time from a central database that only our NPO has access to.