Canadian Red Cross Logo

Mobilizing the power of humanity: Redcross.ca re-design

ecentricarts has been a great partner to Canadian Red Cross, collaborating with our team to deliver engaging experiences to our users. The responsive redesign of our national site has proven to be no exception, yielding stellar results. We’re looking forward to continued success for future phases. – Doug Wayne, Manager, National Digital Marketing

In today’s always-connected world, successful online charitable fundraising means the ability to reach prospective donors in the moment, on any device. It means appealing to supporters by speaking to the need at hand, and to the results their contribution will help generate. It means enabling donors to give wherever, whenever.

While the Canadian Red Cross’ existing website supported a large volume of traffic and online donation activity, we believed we could do better. Because the site was designed and built before the onset of mobile web, it was not optimized for the ever-increasing number of mobile and tablet users. Furthermore, we believed the way people give today — often in the wake of acute disasters and event-based campaigns — mandated a rethink of how the online donations and campaign features of the main CRC site worked.

We were engaged to design and develop a new website that would increase usability, mobile traffic, donations, and audience engagement. We created a new responsive user interface, upgraded the site to the latest version of Kentico CMS (Kentico 8 EMS, Kentico’s digital marketing and enterprise content management edition), and implemented new, innovative online fundraising solutions.

We kicked off the project with a full strategy and UX design phase, employing user testing and rapid prototypes for proof of concepts on the new mobile user experience and key fundraising features. In the process, we identified opportunities to reflow and redesign content and functionality, resulting in a better experience on both desktop and mobile. The design phase saw the creation of a responsive interface, with redesigns of key sections and pages that support thematic or disaster-specific calls to action for fundraising campaigns. We also redesigned the online donations features, enabling donors to direct their contributions while highlighting impact. We brought it all to life with a Kentico CMS site implementation that includes powerful, efficient content publishing, and a suite of marketing automation tools. The site is also optimized for analytics, so we can learn and iterate.

Red Cross Home Page
Red Cross Donate Page

Key user experience features:

  • Complete mobile UX design, which included user testing and rapid prototypes
  • Complete UX redesign of the Your Community section (previously Where We Work), which included user testing and rapid prototypes
  • Intuitive, search-based user experience for Programs and Services, which allows users to flow through the site more easily
Red Cross Programs Page

Key design features

  • Data-driven design informed by A/B testing
  • Grid-based, modern, flexible design
  • Updated typography
  • New iconography to aid in navigation
  • New accent colours and homepage banner to highlight information
Red Cross Mobile Home Page
Red Cross Mobile Donate Page

Key technical features

  • Custom, responsive Kentico 8.2 templates
  • Responsive implementation of templates that carry over from the old site
  • Personalization based on geo-location and proximity filters, showing users custom data on the homepage banner and on Programs and Services pages
  • Social media integration, featuring a Twitter footer that features the latest tweet
  • A/B testing of forms for maximum conversion

View Live Site