Cancer Research UK

The Brief

To increase revenues from fundraising on the web by developing the most effective series of donation forms for online credit card and direct debit giving.

Our approach

The project benefitted from our existing relationship developed providing the online fundraising tools for Cancer Research UK's fundraising campaigns including last year's major "All Clear" campaign.

Improved forms were designed, and new tools developed for Cancer Research UK staff, which give them complete control over form branding and content, enabling them to:

• tailor forms for individual campaigns, combining campaign branding with corporate branding
• develop multiple versions of a form using different wording, questions and field order. Site users are randomly sent to different versions.

Sophisticated reporting then lets staff:

• compare results of each version of the same form
• assess the effectiveness of a form created for Campaign A with that for Campaign B and see how donation levels compare
• apply their findings to develop increasingly effective forms

The scale of the project demanded an ‘e-commerce grade’ system to handle donations - a system sophisticated enough to adapt to individual failures, for example, by switching between WorldPay and Secure Trading dynamically. Fraud prevention is always a priority and the site incorporates a managed fraud filter. The system nightly sorts, checks and categorises donations according to pre-determined rules, set by Cancer Research.

The results

Click-through rates on the forms have increased by 100% since the project started.