Fresh from the Field – UNICEF Aotearoa Website – by Rush Digital

Fresh from the Field is a weekly article series sharing the fresh and inspiring work of our Aotearoa Design Assembly community.

Breathing life into the organisation’s work and outreach in a digital landscape, Rush Digital walk us through their design process behind UNICEF’s new Aotearoa website.

Want to submit your own work to Fresh From The Field? Fill out the FFTF form here.

The brief

UNICEF has improved outcomes for children all around the world in profound ways over its 77 years of history, demonstrating the largest scale, reach, and impact of any child rights organisation globally with its entirely donor-funded programmes of work.

As UNICEF Aotearoa’s donor engagement model was set to move away from face-to-face fundraising and into an online-first approach, we were posed with a challenge…

How might we create a new UNICEF Aotearoa website which gives everyday New Zealanders a greater empathetic connection to UNICEF’s life-changing work around the world, and in doing so, increase the number of online donations through an engaging and innovative digital experience?

design process map from 'the untapped to the champion'

'48 hours is all the time it takes for UNICEF to deliver emergency relief anywhere in the world'

The design response

Together, the RUSH and UNICEF teams kicked off with a collaborative Inception workshop where we formed a Discovery canvas to create a shared understanding of the problem we were solving, as well as the context we were operating in. This formed the basis of our strategy to engage more new first-time donors and increase the number of regular monthly donations coming through the website.

To steer our strategy using a human-centred approach, we created a user type matrix representing the four broad groups that make up our target audience of first-time individual donors. Our design solution had to focus on migrating ‘The Untapped’ audience (those with low awareness of UNICEF and low motivation to donate) to ‘The Champions’ (those with high awareness of UNICEF and high motivation to donate) in order to drive the most impact.

We ran User Journey & Story Mapping workshops that enabled us to clearly visualise how our strategy connected with human needs, market context, and technical possibilities, resulting in our identification of key opportunities that provided a solid foundation for ideation. In parallel, we conducted UX Benchmarking of the current UNICEF Aotearoa website donor experience against that of other local and international charities, as well as Analogous Research where we gathered inspiration from digital products in other relevant spaces.

We reviewed the website’s Information Architecture to better align its navigation structure with common visitor goals and intuitive task pathways, then built out a concept prototype which was user-tested within target audiences. This was then iterated and refined into a set of responsive web page templates supporting key donor touchpoints, built with modular design components to enable maximum content flexibility across the site.

Our secondary design challenge was to provide the UNICEF team with a flexible solution that enables them to continually evolve their website and update live content consistently with the revamped ‘look and feel’, without having to rely on outside expertise. In a closely collaborative process, RUSH’s design & product teams produced comprehensive digital design specs and content guidelines, from which the UNICEF engineering & content teams built dynamic ‘slices’ that content editors can use to create beautiful web pages quickly and easily in Prismic CMS.

Launched in September 2023, the new UNICEF Aotearoa website breathes life into the organisation’s work and outreach in a digital landscape – highlighting the scale and reach of its impact for children worldwide in a style and language that better connects with everyday New Zealanders, and offering a unique interactive online donation experience that helps donors better understand how their money can make a real difference.