The Co-operative Development Foundation of Canada (CDF) has a mandate to bring life changing opportunities, and provide encouragement and support, to the children, women and men in the developing world in an effort to bring them out of poverty. Its mission is to equip those in less fortunate countries with co-operative tools that will change their lives for the better. The CDF does this primarily through cash donations and volunteer time.
RealDecoy partnered with the CDF after receiving a positive word-of-mouth referral for work done on another client’s website. After we created the CDF’s public website, our relationship with the CDF has continued onto performing ongoing site maintenance.
RealDecoy created a website for the Co-operative Development Foundation of Canada (CDF) that included a donations tool – allowing the CDF to directly fundraise via the web.
THE CHALLENGE
The Co-operative Development Foundation of Canada (CDF) approached RealDecoy with the goal of establishing its own web presence, separate from the Canadian Co-operative Association (CCA), the parent organization that the CDF belongs to. (Prior to approaching RealDecoy, the CDF’s site was a part of the CCA’s site.)
The project’s budget was to be small and the timelines would be aggressive.
A donations tool
One of the items of functionality that was particularly important to the CDF the ability to solicit donations from the public online. This would allow them to:
- generate increased revenue.
- slash administration costs associated with the online service they had been previously using for fundraising.
This solution, however, was to be created with an eye to accessibility because the CDF’s key demographic is rural and generally comprised of older individuals. RealDecoy found that visitors had a tendency towards either using computers with older browsers, or were using dial-up connections to access the Internet.
Security was an issue as well, for the donations tool takes credit card information over the Web. RealDecoy had to ensure that this information was safe and secure.
OUR SOLUTION
In devising a digital solution for the Co-operative Development Foundation of Canada (CDF), RealDecoy produced a site that represented the company and its values. RealDecoy and the CDF worked together to ensure the site would also provide the greatest usability to its web visitors.
Making donating easy on the Web
The donations tool that RealDecoy developed was made as usable as possible, keeping in mind that many people who would be using the site might not be connecting through broadband. The tool, for those with dial-up connections, had minimal images and graphics so that it would load quickly.
The solution RealDecoy developed also allowed the CDF to cut the cost of processing online donations. It also helped prevent visitors from getting lost or side-tracked from the process of making a donation. The previous method redirected would-be donors to another website that had a multitude of other charities and organizations soliciting funds online, which generally confused the CDF’s clientele.
One of the features of the new system is that it sends an e-mail update to those handling online fundraising when a new donation is submitted by a visitor. This allows the CDF to stay on top of their online fundraising initiatives.
A secure site
RealDecoy encrypted personal credit card information being transmitted to the CDF by using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) technology. We also came up with a controlled access administration system on the backend as a means of further protection.
Join the mailing list
For the final result, RealDecoy produced a site with a search function and a means for visitors to sign up to the CDF’s mailing list. This allowed visitors to gain access to publications and monthly newsletters. The CDF can now communicate with its visitors more effectively, and maintain a database of invaluable client information for all future initiatives and practices.
Technologies: PHP, MySQL, XHTML, CSS, Javascript
