The situation:

All For Africa is a not-for-profit charitable organization that strikes a non-traditional path in the world of charities. It functions in partnership with for profit companies and leverages their profit making systems and infrastructure to convert donations into investments that multiply the value of those donations many fold in terms of on-the-ground impact. Their mission is to support a variety of sustainable initiatives spread across Africa. Their method is to run an enterprise, in this case palm oil production that turns a $20 donation into a $600 real investment in charitable projects or a $30,000 trust into an over $1,000,000 investment in a beneficiary organization like a school or health facility. This is not something that is easy at the first pass to grasp, and the old All for Africa website did a pretty good job of explaining how it worked. What this website did not do very well, was convert traffic into action. The website was informing people on the organization and its methods, but it was doing almost nothing in terms of getting them to go to the donation page or click the newsletter sign-up button.

All for Africa website before:

To our view the home page lacked a keynote message and had too many points of interest drawing your attention away from what needed to happen which was a click on the “Donate Now!” button. Another thing was that there was no simple explanation of what the campaign was. In fact there were multiple campaigns and even multiple logos vying for the user’s limited attention.

Actions:

We removed all competing logos and overly complicated explanations from the home page. We created a new background related to and supporting the campaign. We emblazoned the top of the page with a new headline that focused on and explained the campaign simply: “1 Million Trees generate 700 million dollars for sustainable projects all across Africa”. We followed this with bullets filling in some details on how the money actually benefits people on-the ground in Africa. This replaced a lot of process explanation which can still be obtained deeper in on the site. Then under the words “Take Action!” we put three “unmissable” buttons for the types of action the user can take. We kept the slide show explaining how it works, but pushed that down so it is mostly below the fold so it no longer distracts attention from the issue at hand so if you came primed to give, you could do so easily and effortlessly. Essentially we have reoriented the focus away from explanation and toward immediate action.

We shortened and clarified the mission statement and kept it, reduced the mish-mash of interior content text that was displayed at the bottom of the page leaving only two items: “Beneficiaries Updates” with news about the recipients of the donations and “Your Voice” which engages with the supporters of the cause. We also left in the Bill Clinton video because people tended to think it was impressive.

We totally revamped the sidebar throughout the site so that now it carries the keynote campaign message and the call to action unmistakably to all interior pages. We also added some other important support features there, replacing the modestly confusing pyramid graphic, and reducing the overemphasis on the tree counter feature (which was detracting attention and making the donate buttons harder to find). We created a nifty “our supporters” feature showing the twitter icons of all the others who recently gave to the cause. This lets the user know that he or she is not alone. Second, we built a simple but easy to use interactive Google map of Africa that allows the user to easily see who all the beneficiary organizations are, where they are and what they do. This can includes photos or video as available. Finally, we added a live Twitter feed of the All for Africa tweets that we are now ramping-up via our social marketing support campaign (minimum 3 Tweets a day 5 days a week) targeted at engaging with the relevant blogging community and promoting an “All for Africa” hash campaign.

All for Africa website after:

Results:

What we have already seen is that the internal traffic on the site has dramatically reoriented with the “Donation” page generating the most hits of any interior page (up from the #22 spot previously). The number two interior page is now “Join In” and #3 is the “Corporate” page which is what’s behind the “Purchase A Trust ” button. This is exactly what the client wanted. Now that the users of the site are doing what they are supposed to do, we now have to push the on-line marketing program so we can increase traffic to the site.