Digital fundraising campaign and website to lift spirits in lockdown

With many major fund raising projects and events scrapped due to the Coronavirus sweeping the globe, charities are faced with a huge hole in their funding. UK children’s charity Barnardo’s acted fast and saw an opportunity to test a concept that would help their supporters as well as secure valuable donations. 

In looking for a team, they found that Studiomade could provide quick thinking and ingenuity to help launch Super Seekers – a new initiative which offers activities to parents to help encourage and entertain children during these stressful times. 

This special project had a window of just two weeks for the MVP to be completed in, but the tight deadlines meant high energy and excitement from everyone that worked on it. An impressive demonstration of what a great concept paired with a dedicated studio and client team can deliver.

Creating a narrative

Barnardo’s wanted to create a narrative to engage children, parents and carers alike. We worked in collaboration with Barnardo’s to develop these characters. The vision for the Super Seeker heroes and heroines brought personality and realism to the concept. The villainous Baron von Bore-Them is intent on spreading boredom to the farthest reaches of the globe and only the Super Seekers can help stop him. They must complete all the activities, each earning them a life skill badge enabling them to defeat the Baron. 

As well as providing the brief for our campaign concept and illustrations, this narrative serves a wider purpose of helping move users around the website as well as fully immerse them into the experience – creating better engagement and hopefully a higher donation for Barnardo’s. 

Demonstrating value

The Super Seekers website has many purposes – to entertain, to educate and ultimately deliver donations for Barnardo’s. While the first two are extremely important, the last is the mechanism that will allow all of this good work to continue. We wanted to try and show users the value of their donations and encourage a higher level of gifting where possible.

By informing users of what an increase in donation may mean to children and families supported by Barnardo’s, we helped to build an emotional connection with visitors that would relate to what Barnardo’s are looking to achieve.

The donation mechanism

Charities work with many donation mechanisms which require compliance, tracking integration and database management, often alongside creation of data protocols and frameworks.

With technical project scoping tackled within the briefing phase, using our knowledge of payment gateways we were able to identify that a Stripe payment integration was possible. It could have been a choice to use Barnardo’s existing main gateway however this would have required much more development time and would have interrupted the user flow. It’s important to not overlook functionality options to ensure that the best choice for the project is made. Here, Stripe was invaluable in delivering smooth development that could be actioned within the very short project window. 

We integrated the payment workflow into our own database creation, providing the Barnardo’s team with GDPR-compliant data that they required.

A brand that lives

Our vision for Super Seekers brought this concept to life and delivered something that works across a wide range of digital and physical channels. The narrative helps shape communications and gives the project a voice of its own, complementing Barnardo’s brand tone. The look and feel brings the little Super Seekers to life and engages users in their battle against Baron Von Bore-Them, making an exciting reality that gives Barnardo’s capacity to grow their world going forward continuing to highlight their knowledge and experience.

Results

This campaign including donation website is a great example of how clients working together with our studio can deliver something incredible in a short timescale. A clear concept leads to fast decision making and a product that can continue to evolve after launch.

Barnardo’s have achieved a much needed new donation product while helping to support their audiences around the country. This has been a really rewarding project to be involved in.