CASE STUDY
Welfare of women and the girl child, Nigeria
A foundation site with four different ways to help, and a donation that finishes here rather than on somebody else's page.
THE PROBLEM
JTAH has worked on the welfare of women and the girl child in Nigeria since 2000. The site has to win donors who give again, not one time gifts driven by guilt.
THE DECISIONS
Each decision, why I made it, and what it cost.
A foundation asking people to stay has to look like it will be here next year, not like an emergency appeal.
Six colours. One mid lilac for everything interactive and deep indigo for text, so nothing else competes for attention.
One contact form loses the people not ready to donate today, and over a few years they are often worth more.
Donate, volunteer, partner and contact each ask one thing. Volunteer has a page per role, and contact arrives with the subject filled in from wherever the visitor came from.
Every jump to an outside checkout is a chance to lose a donation.
Paystack runs in place, and the server confirms the payment itself, so a thank you screen always means the money arrived.
A foundation has to sound credible and human at once.
Playfair Display for headlines, Inter for everything practical, and a handwritten face in a few places where the foundation speaks for itself. Any more often and it becomes a greeting card.
The opening line has to land on a phone and a large monitor without being designed twice.
It scales smoothly with the screen instead of switching at set widths.
THE SCREENS
THE NEXT EXPERIMENT
Google Analytics already counts three actions on the live site: a completed donation, a contact message and a volunteer application. Each test is designed around one of them, with a single metric, a guardrail and a rule for what ships.
Control: ₦10,000 preselected, as the form ships today. Variant: ₦20,000 preselected. Visitors split at random, half and half, for four weeks. Primary metric: average gift. Guardrail: share of visitors who finish a donation.
₦20,000 becomes the default only if the average gift rises and the finish rate holds. Otherwise ₦10,000 stays.
Control: Donate. Variant: Support our work. Visitors split at random, half and half. Primary metric: finished donations from homepage visitors, not clicks, so a vague label cannot win on curiosity.
The label with more finished donations ships. A tie keeps Donate, because it is the clearer promise.
THE DESIGN SYSTEM
Six colours. A lilac background, a deep indigo for text, and one mid lilac for everything you can click.
Playfair Display
The opening line and every section heading. It stretches smoothly from phone to desktop rather than jumping at set widths, with the letters pulled tight so a big heading reads as one thing.
Inter
Body copy, navigation, forms, the donation flow and all the small print. It is the typeface the site spends most of its time in, which is exactly why it never draws attention to itself.
Caveat
A handwritten face kept back for a small number of moments where the foundation speaks as itself. Its whole value comes from how rarely it shows up.
HOW IT WAS BUILT
THE OUTCOME
