Doubling charitable donations with a powerful new website

Challenge

UNICEF works around the world to keep children safe from violence, disease and hunger caused by conflict. UNICEF UK raises funds to support this work and promote the rights of children across the UK. 

UNICEF UK wanted to reassess the role their website played in their digital strategy. manifesto partnered with the charity to rebuild their website, ensuring it supports vital fundraising efforts and increases the impact of the charity's work.

Solution

To understand how UNICEF UK’s website could support their mission of keeping children safe, we ran a review of the organisation’s processes, strategies, web analytics, competitor analysis, developments in the third sector and current website.

We then advised UNICEF UK on how to use different content types to meet the specific needs of their existing supporters and to engage potential future donors. Creating follow up communications with supporters was a huge area of opportunity, as it helped them to see how their money is used to improve the lives of children, strengthening their relationship with UNICEF UK.

The next stage of this work was to design and build the new website. During this phase we became an extension of the UNICEF UK digital team, working together to improve experiences for both supporters of the charity and internal staff.

We used the insights from our research to develop a visual style for the new site, improving the impact of content and its capacity to engage people emotionally with the charity's work. The new site is easy to use, with a flexible page builder tool, and a drag and drop interface that helps UNICEF UK staff make the most of different storytelling techniques. We also produced original motion content for the website, supporting the charity's powerful new content strategy.

Impact

As UNICEF UK’s digital partner we continue to work closely together, moving the website through stages of testing and launch, and incorporating user feedback to make continuous improvements to the website experience.

The UNICEF UK website has now grown into a compelling digital marketing platform that supports the charity's important work. When it launched in November 2016, conversion rates more than doubled for visitors to the website who went on to make donations. Cash donations also increased by 55% per visitor and Unicef UK received more online donations in a single month than ever before.

The UNICEF UK website has since won several awards, including a Silver Lovie Award and People’s Lovie Award for Best Homepage, a Computing Digital Technology Leaders Award for Website Project of the Year and a Drum Network Award for Charity Campaign/Strategy of the Year.