This concept adds gamification to the campaign page by tracking donors who have contributed the most money to a cause or have referred the most other donors to the cause. We believed the competition element would act as social proofing and increase credibility of campaign in the users’ eyes (by seeing other people engaged), as well as create momentum.

Our test results to this concept were very divergent:
While some users thought the concept was cheap, and not in the spirit of philanthropy, others loved it, thought is was engaging and would most likely increase donation amount.
Either way, majority of test participants thought this concept increased their confidence in campaign’s legitimacy and momentum through social proofing.

Following the mixed reaction in round one of testing we created a new version that was focused on recognition rather than competition: this time we left out sums of money, used a different language, and added a “see all” button, which implies that donors are all equally significant.

Though this version was a little less polarizing, users were still divided.

Ultimately, the social proof aspect was further validated: it increased campaign’s legitimacy and momentum, though further testing with a larger sample group is required in order to decide how to best implement it. 

To address the transparency issue that many interviewees brought up as a frustration, we wanted to show the user a plan broken into steps on a timeline, hoping it would make the cause credible and achievable.

The reaction of all test participants to this concept was extremely positive: showing a plan for the money increased users confidence in the campaign and likelihood of contribution.
The visual itself was not clear though: it took most test participant some time to digest the information presented in the diagram, and a lot of them could not actually understand that it refers to the future.

We wanted users to be able, at a glance, to understand the concept of how the money is being used. We experimented with several ways to visualise a roadmap, getting inspiration from scrum burndown charts, trackers and timelines.

We ended up with an interactive timeline: hovering on each step brings details and highlights the section with the brand color.

We realized that it’s impossible to associate each step of the plan with a specific amount of money that would be spent for it, so we removed sums of money from the timeline and added some explanation as an educational text, and to avoid a text heavy page we transformed a big portion of it to infographics.

The new roadmap played a lot better: all test participants understood the intention and meaning behind it and they continued to appreciate the transparency it provided. The added interactivity provided higher level of engagement.