Donate (2024-DON)
- Elena Gorman
onboarding - To begin in september 2024
Start date: | September 2024 |
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End date: | July 2025 |
On this page…
Pre-discovery (this link takes you to a new page)
Project launch (this link takes you to a new page)
Summary
Donate is a strategically important project, involving colleagues from across the organisation, to improve the user experience, ease of development, and data processes associated with donations and event payments, in order to substantially increase annual income.
In 2024/25, Shelter aims to raise a total of £5.9m.
However, our ability to achieve this goal is hindered by limitations in the technology that enables us to take donations.
For over a decade, Shelter has used a third-party platform - iRaiser - to manage revenue from donations and events. But colleagues have reported that the platform does not meet our needs in terms of data capture and donor insights, is difficult to maintain, does not facilitate quick and easy iterations to respond to evolving business and user needs, and does not meet basic usability and accessibility standards.
In 2022-23, on the request of the Individual Giving Team, discovery work was carried out to explore issues with the iRaiser payment platform. The report listed the issues, and recommended that further development on the platform should be paused while alternative platforms or solutions are explored.
In 2023-24, in response to a request for development of the main donation page, an initial exploration was carried out to gather insights from stakeholders across the organisation, and conduct research to identify business requirements for a new donation solution.
Following this, the current (as-is) and desired (to-be) technology architecture was mapped out, and options for replacing iRaiser were considered.
It has since been agreed to secure a new third-party provider for the donation platform, and to design and build a new events payment platform in-house.
The Donate project plans are captured in a Project Implementation Document.
Launching in September 2024, and working in Scrum, the Donate project will include discovery and design of donation and events journeys, to inform the build / procurement of new platforms for donations and events that will go live in July 2025.
It is anticipated that new, best-in-class donation user journeys and technology would enable Shelter to access data to identify trends in user behaviour and donation activity, adapt user journeys to increase online conversation rates and maximise income, innovate at pace, and ultimately increase income by up to £2m per year.
For the Digital Design Team, this project will involve discovery and design relating to users, user journeys, and the technologies that support user journeys, across both donations and events.
Project stages
Stage | Summary | Status |
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Background information, initial desk-based research, user research and analysis to identify business needs for the donation platform. | complete | |
Donate project launch scheduled for September 2024. | to begin | |
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Objectives
Project team
Useful links
Further reading
Next to Pre-Discovery: Donate (2024-DON)