Send a Cow
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Charity & NFP
Send a Cow
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Charity & NFP
From a new website to an evolving virtual gift store and a fully integrated digital campaign, we’re helping this charity unleash the potential of digital.
Our brief
We first worked with international development charity Send a Cow when we created their current website. Since then, we’ve continued to develop the site, as well as working with them strategically on all sorts of digital comms and campaigns.
What we did
Our first task for Send a Cow was to develop a new website with robust functionality and measurability, which could address an array of audiences on many fronts: fundraising, connecting with partners and raising awareness. As one of the first charities to develop a virtual gift proposition, they also needed a more engaging, distinctive online catalogue, as they'd been overtaken in this market during recent years.
The success of that initial work has become the foundation of much more. For example, we’ve recently updated the site to make the charity’s new, more complex fulfilment offer as simple as possible. To clarify a potentially confusing range of purchasing options we took a completely fresh look at the checkout journey, starting with wireframe models to test the various possibilities.
Using the latest in best practice User Experience (UX) form theory, we built a process that makes choosing and paying as smooth as possible, minimising the chance that customers may drop out instead of checking out. We removed the primary navigation from the checkout pages, for example, and looked carefully at the hierarchy of buttons and the grouping of fields.
For the Christmas campaign, we made a radical proposal: an integrated online campaign to say ‘Thank you’ to the supporters who have given Send a Cow almost £10 million online in the last decade.
Over a ten-week period, the charity featured five, randomly chosen supporters to appear across every channel — from the homepage to the donation section, gift site and emails. They even took over the charity’s Facebook and Twitter profiles. Each supporter also got their own page on the site, telling the story of their support. Beyond the web, Send a Cow added handwritten thank you notes to gift purchases, and made personal thank you calls to supporters.
The first supporter, Janet Key, was thrilled: “No one has ever done anything like this for me before, it’s brilliant,” she said. The campaign has created an enormous buzz for the charity, helping it engage and retain supporters in tough economic times.
This is just the latest project in our continuing work for Send a Cow. Watch out for another major campaign in the spring of 2012.
‘It quickly became clear that Positive’s ‘Thank you’ idea had huge potential for supporter engagement beyond social networks, across all marketing channels and right throughout the year. The campaign has really brought every department at Send a Cow together and brings us closer to our supporters and Positive too. Everyone has appreciated this is something pretty special, and it reminds us all to be more thankful to each other every day.’
Lorraine Finnigan, Communications Manager, Send a Cow