The problem

Web app developers Neteffekt were marking their 10th year in business by aiming to raise £10k for Birmingham Children’s Hospital over a 6 month period. They asked me to help them achieve their target, together we outlined the requirements as:

• A visual identity: generate buzz and galvanise the team
• Utilise a donation service (e.g. Just Giving): must be easy to use and positively contribute to project
• A microsite: generate donations and allow donors to track the project’s progress

The solution

Clean, friendly visual identity

• Selected fonts and colours to co-brand well with Neteffekt.
• Clean design reflected Neteffekt’s focus on ease-of-use.
• Extra dimension of friendliness/personality through slightly playful visuals (amplified by interactions/animations on the microsite) - required to encourage people to donate to or support the project.

A better donation service

• Researched a number of donation services: most (including Just Giving) did not provide the visual aesthetic or donation user experience to match the rest of the project.
• Givey, was a much closer fit and had the added bonus of all monies going directly to charity (did you know Just Giving currently takes an 5% cut?)

A dynamic, fun microsite

• Broke down the site into sections of: What is it? How is it going? How can I contribute?
• Simple animations encourage users to interact with project.

Highlight dynamic aspect of project

• Live totals raised and donations pulled from Givey API. Encourages repeat visits/donations and galvanises the team towards achieving their target.
• Countdown to next challenges and tweets of support.
• I utilised static-site generator Assemble, it’s use of Handlebars meant I could serve static HTML (fast) and re-render it in JS when data was available from the Givey API

The outcome

• Assemble’s use of YML/JSON as data source meant it was simple for Neteffekt to update descriptions / text within the site after I’d finished my work.
• At the time of writing: Neteffekt are 59% towards hitting their target - with 5 more challenges to run and 101 days left it looks like they should smash it!