Little girl

Save the Children

Save the Children is one of Australia's largest aid agencies dedicated to helping children. Its mission is to support the most vulnerable children in Australia and abroad, protecting them from harm and giving them access to quality education and health services. Its programs include ongoing aid, as well as providing emergency services in disaster situations.

Client:

Save the Children Australia

Tagged:

Charities & not for profit

How We Helped:

Who We Helped:

The challenge

Save the Children’s website plays a critical role in receiving donations and distributing information about emerging crises and aid requirements. This information is often time-sensitive, so it’s crucial that content can be uploaded quickly and easily. The problem was that the existing website had been built on an old legacy CMS that had become clunky and inefficient for content administrators to use. 

As well as addressing this problem, Save the Children wanted a site that would help it increase donation rates by encouraging more user engagement and empathy. There was also a need to improve integration between the website and CRM system.

Save the Children Christmas appeal screen shot
Woman with child

Quick stats

Conversion rate increase

Increase in share of traffic from organic search

Increase in time on site

Save the Children website on mobile phones

What we did

Early on in the process it was decided that the site would need to be migrated away from the legacy CMS to achieve Save the Children’s objectives. Kentico was identified as the best fit.

Replatforming onto Kentico meant the site could be built using a componentised design approach – allowing content editors to quickly create strong stories with beautifully designed, quality-tested elements. This has allowed them to focus on creating the story, rather than on time-consuming page configuration. It has also meant more time is available for campaign development and other higher-value tasks.

The use of powerful, high quality imagery and a clear, easily accessible layout have led to Save the Children being able to tell stories in a way that really engenders empathy and a desire to help.

The new site also lends itself to better tailoring of elements like landing pages to particular appeals. So instead of having a generic message, the pages and related forms are now much more easily tailored with a campaign-specific message. The result is that the donor is more engaged with the story right throughout the journey, from the landing page through to the final thank you page. 

A new master page allows the user to sign up to the newsletter, click through to social media pages and call the organisation from anywhere across the site, further enhancing conversion optimisation.

With a site that now fully integrates with the CRM, this frictionless continuity will now be able to be extended beyond the website into communications via email or other channels. 

Newsletter sign-up page

The result

Save the Children has seen some outstanding results from the new site, including a conversion rate increase of 198% (4.81%, up from 1.61%). The increase has been particularly notable in terms of the rise in regular charitable giving, with regular giving up from 0.89% on the old site to 5.84% on the new site. 

Within the first month of going live, the share of traffic from organic search has increased by 11.5% to 38.76%, which is testament to the strong SEO strategy in place prior to the migration. Time on site went up from an average of 2.05 minutes to 2.11 minutes, while the average number of pages visited in a session went from 1.96 to 2.59. The site also received two design awards in its first few weeks of operation.

Donations widget results in further uplifts

As part of Luminary’s ongoing commitment to continuous improvement with our retainer clients, several years after the initial launch of this site, we designed and built a donations widget for Save the Children that has resulted in significant uplifts in both conversions and total donation values. The widget allows donors to make their contribution directly, without having to navigate away from the home page. The widget was A/B tested against the pre-existing home page banner during Save the Children’s mid year donation campaign in 2023. 

The widget resulted in a 319% increase in the value of one-off donations, and an 89% increase in the value of regular giving. The conversion rate for one-off donations also increased by 261%, while the regular giving conversion rate increased by 22%. The donations widget has now been adopted as an ongoing feature of the home page.

Donations widget
Luminary went above and beyond for us. From the designers right through to the developers, they genuinely care about the products and services they’re helping clients to sell. They have a real interest in understanding what will make our business a success, not just the website itself. The type of people who work there and the culture of the organisation is what allows them to help us achieve our goals. No bump was too big to solve. The approach to solving our problems was very calm and methodical.
Little girl smiling

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