World Vision’s Child Sponsorship Digital Acquisition Journey

Child Sponsorship (CSPON) is World Vision’s flagship digital experience. Each year, tens of thousands of Australians donate to World Vision via CSPON to help eradicate child poverty. In a time of tight household budgets and a busy charity market, capturing people’s financial support is increasingly difficult. Meanwhile, there is a growing need for funds to support life-changing work in developing countries. Conflict and humanitarian crises are pushing more children and families into poverty. Therefore, increasing sponsorships through the digital experience is critical. In late 2023, World Vision approached Symplicit to help address the downward trend in support.

World Vision and Symplicit set out three-goals to improve conversion, these goals informed our research and design plan: Enhance potential sponsors’ understanding of the product. Improve usability throughout the digital acquisition journey. Increase the emotional connection between the sponsor and child. Phase one of our design solution established baseline performance of the existing digital acquisition journey. In phase two, we reimagined the experience based on benchmarks, testing insights, and World Vision’s expertise. We also considered donor’s needs and motivations. Symplicit used Attrakdiff to facilitate a comparative test and validate our design interventions prior to implementation.

The newly designed digital acquisition journey for Child Sponsorship (CSPON) outperformed the existing design on both the hedonic and pragmatic traits of the Attrakdiff survey, we achieved: 2x stronger emotional connection between existing and new design. 30% increase in potential sponsors’ understanding of CSPON. 20% improvement in perceived usability through the digital acquisition journey. This gave positive indications that the new design would result in increased sponsorships and enable projects that empower communities to overcome poverty. Because of World Vision’s community-focused solutions, for every child a sponsor helps, four more benefit.

The new Child Sponsorship digital acquisition journey sets the standard for effective digital marketing in the not-for-profit sector. The redesign addresses the unique challenges faced by charities such as World Vision. Unlike typical e-commerce websites, where users simply select products, Child Sponsorship necessitates a departure from standard browsing patterns due to its ethical and emotional intricacies. The innovative approach involved several key strategies. Firstly, the design team adopted storytelling to establish a stronger emotional connection between potential sponsors and children in need. An interactive questionnaire recommends a child for sponsorship based on the answers that the sponsor provides. Secondly, the redesign introduces a new interactive map feature, that showcases the breadth of World Vision’s reach. The data shown on the map was gathered by monitoring and evaluation experts who have knowledge of projects in each country. The map highlights the effectiveness of World Vision’s work. This feature plays a key role in building sponsors’ trust. Lastly, the new digital sponsorship acquisition journey introduces innovative navigation elements. These interactions ensure accessibility and modernity in design. They also enable users with varying degrees of digital skill to navigate effortlessly.