The Client:
Project HOPE (Health Opportunities for People Everywhere) is dedicated to providing lasting solutions to health problems with the mission of helping people to help themselves. They provide medical training, health education, and humanitarian assistance in more than 35 countries around the world.

The Problem:
Project HOPE came to Convio looking for a more modern, user-friendly and administrator-friendly website. They needed the new site to make a better case for donations and to appeal to a younger audience of emerging leaders in addition to their older, more established constituent base. Through the process, Project HOPE wanted to learn as much as possible about their current users and those they were looking to appeal to, however, they were working on a very tight timeline to prepare the site in time for their board meeting that was just 4 months away.

How We Solved It:
Convio worked with Project HOPE to develop a phased plan for the new site. The initial phase included a quick-fix redesign that incorporated best practices to solve many immediate problems but did not integrate research and knowledge about the target audiences. While the team was building out the first phase, Convio began in-depth user research to get feedback from HOPE’s target audiences. A survey of Project HOPE’s constituents was conducted to learn more about their needs from the website as well as a card sort test to find out how visitors to ProjectHOPE.org organize and perceive the content on the website. Based on the research, four constituent personas were established for Project HOPE to help build a solid understanding and communication plan around key audience groups. The research and resulting personas were used to develop the phase two website that incorporated more content and user-specific pathways. Additionally, the team worked to develop a back-end architecture for the new site to migrate the Project HOPE site to Convio CMS to allow for more administrator flexibility and scalability for long-term use.

The Outcome:
Since the new website has launched, Project HOPE has seen amazing results:

• The website bounce rate has decreased by 25 percent meaning that 25 percent fewer visitors leave the site without clicking any links
• The number of pages viewed per visit has increased by 19 percent
• The average amount of time spent on the site has increased by 38 percent indicating that users are clicking deeper into the site and staying longer

Convio products used: Fundraising, Web Content Management