Charity Website Design — TESA Wildlife Case Study

A responsive charity website with a merchandise shop, built for a rhino conservation cause.

How the project came about

Mediatopia is a charity web design agency and first heard about this charity through a friend, a professional photographer. He had met the founder, Angie Goody, at an event in London and asked whether we would like to get involved in creating a new website. We jumped at the opportunity — we are always keen to use our creative skills to help humanitarian causes, and if our efforts would assist in saving rhinos from extinction then we would take on the project.

We set about conjuring up a new charity website look and feel that would immediately grab attention, and developed a responsive design complete with a shop for purchasing merchandise. With the feedback from Angie, we believe we contributed to a worthwhile cause.

What a charity website has to do differently

A commercial website asks for money in exchange for something. A charity website asks for money in exchange for a feeling, and that changes everything about how it has to be built. The emotional case has to land in the first few seconds, before anyone reads a word of the mission statement.

That means photography and video carry the argument, and the donate route has to be visible from every page without being obnoxious. Charities routinely bury the donate button below the fold on a page about governance. The people who were ready to give have already gone.

Merchandise is often the overlooked half. A supporter who buys a t-shirt becomes a walking advertisement and is far more likely to give again. Building e-commerce into the site rather than sending people to a third-party store keeps the relationship, and the data, with the charity.

Building for small charity budgets

Most charities are running on a fraction of what a commercial client would spend, and every pound on the website is a pound not spent on the cause. That argues for building something maintainable in-house rather than something that needs a developer on retainer.

A straightforward content management system means volunteers and staff can add news, update campaigns and change photography themselves. The site stays current, which matters more for a charity than for almost anyone else — a donation page still showing last year’s appeal does real damage to trust.

If you run a charity or non-profit and the website is not doing the cause justice, get in touch. The PARN membership case study is a comparable project in a different sector.

Need a website for your charity?

Tell me what you need and I will give you a fixed price. You deal with the person who builds it — not an account manager, not an offshore team.