Over and Above Africa
Designed a website for OAAA to show their impact in wildlife conservation and raise funds.
Role / Responsibilities
User Interviews
Social design
Web Design
Organization
Over and Above Africa
Team
Myself
Priyanka Kumari
Emily Vandermey
Amanda Yeoh
Duration
2 months
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HOw Might we
engage with a younger audience under 35
through donations and support for wildlife conservation.
A website to help OAAAA raise funds and show the impact they create.
Getting to know under 35
We started interviewing people under 35 to gauge their knowledge and interest level in wildlife conservation.
6 interviews
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1 interview with wildlife conservation activist
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21 responses from survey
Expert Insights
According to our wildlife conservationist expert, it is important for an organization to showcase transparency and organizational capacity as that is what is of top priority for any donor.
GABI FLEURY
Conservationist at Rainforest Trust
Forbes 30 under 30
Are funds going where they say they are?
Are NGO members part of the community?
How successful were their past initiatives?
What is their organizational capacity?
Identified Opportunities
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Based on the insights from our research we identified 3 paths to engage young audience in wildlife conservation.
Redesigned the O&AA website to emphasize partnering organizations, memberships incentives, and action items for donors, volunteers, and corporate sponsors.
We defined our Design principles based on our 3 approaches to create engagement for younger audience of under 35 and came up with multiple designs.
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Create connections with local communities
Start with the big picture before the details
Gradually display member benefits
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Ideation and Iterations
With our objectives in mind, we has started with ideating all 3 paths- Impact driven, Partnership driven and Narrative driven. We started storyboarding ideas based on our conversations with wildlife activists, and interviews where we created a number of concepts to consider.
Did a quick evaluation of the current website and drew a lo-fi mockup for user testing. We did compare and contrast the current website and the mock-up with users.
In our design sprint we meticulously kept iterating our designs based on user feedback. We highlighted the impact of work Over and Above Africa does including few stints of spreading awareness. Another important design consideration was to integrate the wildlife conservation with other areas of activisim for users to understand the impact they could create on overall health of the planet.
Analysing Impact vs Effort
Co-creation Workshop with Client.
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​Glimpse into their passion towards wildlife conservation and need to engage under 35
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Defining engagement priorities
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Clarifying the intended audience and expectations from them
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Identifying organizational constraints and leveraging the existing strengths.
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Delivering a self-sustainable design system
Apart from designing the homepages and few other pages we also designed templates and UI design guidelines. Since Over and Above Africa had only one web development person who handles the website management we decided to create smart templates to be used around the entire website. These templates would save time, effort and maintain the consistency of the website. Along with the design of homepage, we developed the style guide and specifications for their later use.
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" We had the absolute joy of working with Kanika and her amazing team Amanda, Em and Priyanka at Social Lab on my non-profit, OverAndAboveAfrica.com. Kanika and her team came up with creative ways for our team to brainstorm with them on a better User Experience for our members. We can’t wait to implement what we discovered together! #HighlyRecommend"
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Kerry David
CEO Over & Above Africa
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Takeaways
Working towards sustainable design system- As Over and Above Africa runs totally on volunteer basis and doesnot have permanent work force. It was important to design a system where handover can be easy without hampering the growth. The templates my team designed can be used by even a non-web developer to create a website using wix or squaresapce.
Connecting the dots- Most of our interviewers were aware and willing to donate for the causes like climate and change but hardly informed about the connection between climate change and wildlife conservation. Highligthing this connection and partnership with other non-profits can helpful in growing user base as well raising awareness.
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