Work
Customer experience design foundations to transform donor experience
World Vision Australia
In Brief
In Detail
Challenge
For World Vision’s flagship child sponsorship program, the first 12 months represents a critical, high risk period of cancellations. A guiding hypothesis was that onboarding, or the early experience, was a cause.
Improving donor retention required a strategic view of ‘onboarding’ to define an overarching vision, what success looks like and how it is measured.
Outcomes
Designed a series of highly collaborative workshops to engage key stakeholders in the onboarding process in shared reflection, dialogue and ideation
Undertook desktop research, competitive analysis and applied innovation frameworks, behavioural design and the jobs to be done framework to reframe thinking about onboarding as an early experience that was key to addressing ‘buyer’s regret’
Developed recommendations, behavioural principles and defined opportunity areas and tactics for further exploration to transform the early experience
How it was done
Cross-functional engagement of key stakeholders to align thinking on audience cohorts and generate new possibilities
Developed goals rooted in audience needs, motivations and desires, with supporting metrics that drive the right incentives, to help align activities and improve donor retention in the first 12 months
Design principles that can drive habit-forming behaviour and embed child sponsorship more strongly in donors’ lives
Developed opportunity areas to guide strategic thinking about onboarding that can help shift the needle on retention
Recommendations on defining a shared vision for onboarding to drive wider transformation
One of Australia’s largest humanitarian charities, World Vision Australia’s primary income source is regular, monthly contributions from individual donors in the form of ‘child sponsorship’.
In recent years, cancellations in the first year among key audience cohorts has been increasing. Prime Motive was engaged to strategically review the donor onboarding of child sponsorship as a first step towards the broader re-imagination of the early donor experience.
Leveraging behavioural design with broad engagement
Our approach drew on behavioural science as well as design thinking frameworks, complemented with broad, cross-functional engagement to expand perspective and uncover new opportunities.
Workshops
Eight participants contributed to a ninety minute workshop, engaging members from the product and experience design, retail, marketing and data analytics teams. Working in small groups supported by two facilitators we unpacked audience needs and motivations to identify themes and opportunities to explore further.
Synthesis and sense-making
We synthesised the findings to identity themes and contradictions between audience segments, complementing this with desktop research to define behavioural principles, opportunity areas and recommendations to transform onboarding.
Playback and recommendations report
We presented findings and recommendations to key stakeholders and workshop participants for feedback and next steps.
A clear path forward
For donors, the first 12 month period effectively constitutes an onboarding phase, where every interaction and the overall journey should validate their decision to become a child sponsor.
We discovered many opportunities to balance the organisational priority of retention and audience needs and jobs to be done in the first 12 months to:
create strong and close connections to the child they are sponsoring
build habits that strengthen this bond
embed child sponsorship in their wider personal lives
reaffirm that child sponsorship is a reflection of their identity and ‘proof’ of who they are.
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