Increasing charitable donations and awareness through content

About the client

The Animal Health Trust employs over 200 scientists, vets, and support workers. Its principal objectives are to fight disease and injury in animals and to advance the teaching and practice of veterinary art and science. Thanks to their pioneering work, horses, dogs, and cats are living healthier, happier lives – in the UK and across the world.

Project goals

• Increase online donations
• Improve navigation enabling the different audiences to find information relevant to them quickly
• Design an attractive and interactive website, with an easy-to-use CMS.

Increasing online donations

As a charity, the Animal Health Trust relies heavily on public support and generous donations.

The new website needed to engage with the public, showcasing the vital work that the charity carries out and politely encouraging visitors to donate online.

As is often the case, AHT is using a third-party service to collect donations (Committed Giving). We designed and implemented a donation form that is user-friendly and seamlessly integrates within the main AHT website whilst working within the constraints of the third-party donation management platform. We also took care of communicating directly with the technical team of Committed Giving.

The website is already having a big impact on funding for the charity. When we compared Feb/March/April 2019 donations to the same months in 2018, the charity saw a 31% increase in the total value of online donations and a 220% increase in the total number of online donations.

Improving navigation

The Animal Health Trust works with wide-ranging audiences; from vets and scientists to the general public and their generous sponsors.

An initial discovery phase brought into focus the business requirements, along with user goals and their needs. This was followed by a workshop that helped define key user groups and their critical paths, which resulted in a recommended information architecture (IA) for the new website.

Shortly after the new website launched equine flu broke out. There was a huge increase in traffic and the new website was crucial in educating users about the epidemic. The key information about equine flu was available in PDF. Between 28th January and 26th February 2019, this PDF had been downloaded 25,180 times.

Implementing an easy to use CMS

To ensure the website remains current and showcases the breadth of work the Animal Health Trust carry out, it was critical we selected an easy to use Content Management System (CMS).

Using WordPress we were able to build a selection of templates and components, which allow the Animal Health Trust to ‘mix and match’ various content types and showcase them in a range of ways; from text and images, through to audio and video.

We undertook CMS training with the AHT staff, to ensure they have autonomy on managing their content, and are utilising all content types available to them within the CMS.