Doing Words

My Charity Water: case study in homepage conversion

// October 21st, 2009 // Marketing, Startup

My frequent readers (hi Mum!) will know I’m a sucker for charitable causes. In particular, I love Oxfam Trailwalker, MSF, Kiva, Pathways Foundation, MS Australia, and JDRF, However, the charity sector as a whole is not a great source of online marketing inspiration. If you need to find examples of poor online marketing, there are many great examples among charities (and SEO optimisation experts, ironically.)

An exception — and also a great case study in visitor-to-customer conversion — is Mycharitywater.org. Mum, by the time you read this, Mycharitywater will have moved on from their milestone of reaching USD$500,000, which translates into 100 water development projects in poor communities in the third world. There are many reasons for this success, but you only need to examine the design of Mycharitywater’s homepage to understand: these are people who understand how to convert online visitors to customers.

Online visitors are famously fickle. While online marketing is the most targetable, measurable marketing medium, and anything from a tweet to a well-written paid search ad might bring a visitor to your website, most visitors won’t become a customer (sign up, buy, donate, or whatever else your conversion goal is).

An online visitor must invest very little effort to engage with our brand (compared to the effort required to recall a radio, newspaper or TV ad when next in a retail setting) and their commitment to staying around is correspondingly low. If you don’t hook them on the first glance at your homepage, you’ve lost them.

Homepage design needs to be all about converting visitors to customers, and you only need a few minutes on the Mycharitywater website to see how to do it well (click on the image below if you need to view a larger version of the page).

What is working so well?

1. The most important visitor action is highlighted in the only contrasted elements on the page — the two “get started now” buttons. Quickly glance at the page and away again — what stays with you? Those two buttons.
2. The page is clearly prioritised vertically to address what you need to know before you take action. Want to understand what the charity does? A simple three-step infographic tells you everything. Want to be sure that you’re doing something that lots of other people are doing too? Here’s a clear table of donations to date, people served, projects delivered and members. Want to learn more? There’s a text version of the founding myth and a founding myth video to address both accessibility issues and the different levels of attention of online visitors.
3. The organisation’s logo takes a back seat to conversion. Every startup has a battle between the need to gain customers and the need to build a brand. Trust me: the best way to build brand awareness is to make every visitor a happy customer.
4. This is the most exciting element of the page design for me: the key frame of the Learn More video doesn’t display a computer screen! Instead it shows a dramatically-lit, interesting face, head tilted to indicate an animated and engaging speaker, clearly about to tell you an interesting story.
5. The Learn More video is an absolute cracker of a narrative, building on a clear, memorable and exciting founding myth, it builds momentum over time and leaves you feeling like many great things are possible, if only you take the first step.

So, take the first step. Signup with Mycharitywater yourself and see if the experience of being their customer matches the experience of visiting their site for the first time. So far, it has done for me.