Case Study: Alzheimer’s Association
Riding into 2019 with a New Event Site
Alzheimer’s Association launched a new fundraising cycling event, Ride to End ALZ, in late 2018. Charity Dynamics was instrumental in the event’s launch, creating a website with a fresh look within the Alzheimer’s Association brand to clearly communicate the event’s mission and fundraising commitment and inspire people to join. By studying the association’s past events, analytics, and best practices using the the organization’s fundraising platform, Charity Dynamics greatly improved the user experience throughout the Ride to End ALZ site.
To understand how the Ride audience uses the site and to track overall performance within the donation, registration, navigation, and participant fundraising processes, Charity Dynamics utilized Hotjar and Google Analytics Event Tracking to evaluation the registration process and site usage for future changes or improvements. Visit the the Ride to End ALZ website.
- We needed to ensure that the website not only effectively communicated the Alzheimer’s Association’s mission, but also the high fundraising commitment participants wouild be making — and most important, that 100% of the amount raised would go directly to research.
- The lengthy registration process needed to be streamlined to get participants fundraising as quickly as possible after registration.
- The site needed to foster a fundraising culture within the Ride community by making it easy to login, use fundraising tools, and understand the mission and why their required fundraising is so important to the organization.
- The Ride to End ALZ program needed a new look within the Alzeimer’s Association’s brand, while keeping the site intuitive and inspirational. Focus needed to be placed on language, color and movement to get everyone excited about the new endurance event.
- Effective tracking was needed to better understand usage patterns and where the association could focus its time and energy to improve performance and user experience.
Peer-to-Peer Program Services
Whether you need to take your walk, run, endurance or DIY program to the next level or are exploring peer-to-peer fundraising for the first time, Charity Dynamics knows what it takes to inspire supporters to make your mission their own and fundraise on your behalf.
- Working very closely with the Alzheimer’s Association team, we conducted focus groups to better understand their brand direction, their preferred language for inspiring riders, and their volunteers, crew, and donors. These sessions helped us solidify direction for each primary goal for fundraising, registration, and site direction.
- We prioritized messaging on the website to highlight that 100% of fundraising goes to Alzehimer’s research — something completely different from other Alzheimer’s Association events.
- We used past tracking data to analyze the event’s registration process and to hone in on how we could minimize time spent on registration to maximize time in fundraising. For improved user experience, we focused on quick entry into registration, fewer registration questions, specific fundraising asks, and providing a direct path to the participant center.
- We drew inspiration for the event website’s look and feel from the event logo and the association’s desire to appeal to a more modern audience.
- For the participant center (aka Ride Hub), we incorporated and reworked much of the existing code base used for Walk to End Alzheimer’s, allowing us to implement a more modern workflow for front-end development.
- The Ride to End ALZ website was successfully launched. The new endurance cycling fundraising program currently offers two locations and dates and is poised to easily scale as the program grows.
- Having all funds raised go to research sets the Ride to End ALZ program apart from other similar events in the cycling fundraising space.
- The event website clearly tells the Alzheimer’s story across the entire site and emphasizes where the fundraising dollars will be directed and how the event can help fight a disease that currently does not have a cure.
- Charity Dynamics designed the event website to create a smooth and helpful user experience and includes the following features:
- A more dramatic, geometric look, with bold color usage (and inclusion of black in the color scheme) and custom-created design assets.
- A streamlined three-step registration process that also educates registrants on how fundraising is a key component to being able to ride.
- Mobile responsiveness with content priority and bold, bright callouts to make viewing on any smaller devices easy.
- A landing page that includes a bright, bold and spacial design highlighting event details (when, where, contact details), fundraising specifics (days to event, fundraising progress), and fundraising leaders (leaderboards, easy to find search tools to locate friends).
- Consistent, easy to use navigation that emphasizes when a participant is logged in.
- A participant center (Ride Hub) that highlights participants’ actions (update their page, send an email) within the center’s navigation to allow a “one-click” action to their desired fundraising spot.
- A simplified email design that focuses more on content and allows for email to load quickly and efficiently for mobile users.
- Charity Dynamics made the registration process as streamlined and painless as possible by:
- Driving users directly into the registration process from the landing page when they are ready to register.
- Decreasing the number of registration steps by bringing the waiver process into the additional questions step.
- Pushing registrants directly into fundraising mode by using a redirect and thank-you lightbox to avoid a separate registration thank-you page.
- Using Hotjar to record and understand mouse tracking through the registration process to find any issues within the new registration user experience.
- The participant center (Ride Hub) is fully responsive and includes a great array of fundraising tools to help get the rider, crew, or volunteer to their fundraising goals:
- Adapted the guided tour from the Walk participant center to help educate participants on all the great tools within the center.
- Used a lightbox series to thank and then drive participants to the most important fundraising elements to get them to their goal.
- Added event tracking through the navigation, home page, and other structural elements to understand usage so Alzheimer’s Association can better understand its participants’ most desired items to continue building and growing the areas that are most used.
- Included the Boundless Fundraising suite (Social, Mobile App) in the participant center to enhance the fundraising process by providing for fundraising on the go and the ability to post and communicate about the eventvia LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and texting.