The Client 

World Vision UK is the UK branch of World Vision International, a Christian relief organisation dedicated to working with children, families and communities to overcome poverty and injustice. They are committed to making a serious and sustainable impact on poverty, especially where it affects children, and believe that connecting people, whether through community enablement, sponsorship or campaigning for justice, is the best way to make a difference.

The Challenge

World Vision UK is positioned in the highly competitive charity sector, at the forefront of a movement to embrace new technologies and use digital channels to increase the volume and diversity of donations. As the charity’s website is built on Amaxus’ flexible content management platform, best-of-breed e-commerce functionality could be easily integrated to seamlessly handle one-off payments such as gifts and emergency appeals. However, the charity wanted to improve their longer-term donation services to secure more funding, particularly with regards to child sponsorship. 

Our Solution

It was crucial that the child sponsorship area of the site provided potential sponsors with a wide range of information about the children they would be helping, in order to foster a strong connection to the cause and encourage donations. To achieve this, Amaxus’ extensible custom content types were used to allow the charity’s back end administrators to quickly and easily upload profiles of those children in need of sponsorship.

Using Amaxus’ sophisticated classification system, these profiles could be tagged to various categories including continent, country and age range allowing front-end users to filter their search, helping them more effectively find a child they connect with. In order to comply with all privacy and security legislation, Amaxus also automatically watermarks the images and prevents saving of photos.

As World Vision is committed to making a lasting change in the lives of children, the initial online sponsorship process needed to be supported by a dedicated space where users could interact with their child once they had commenced sponsorship. The development of this area included using Amaxus' form functionality to allow letters to be sent and managed in the Amaxus backend, support with sending birthday cards (including automatic reminders), and advice on visiting the children. 

The Outcome

Post-project, World Vision UK now provide their users with direct insight into the lives of those they are supporting, and increased choice over where their money goes. In addition, the individual profiles for each child have boosted the charity's SEO, helping them maintain a high position in the search engine results pages for key terms such as 'Sponsor a Child' and drive even more people to the site. 

The management of the sponsor-child relationship made possible through the ‘My Sponsorship’ area helps sustain and deepen the end user's connection with their child. This has had a bottom-line impact on the level of donations received, and the charity’s ability to help those in need. 

For More Information

For more information or to arrange a demo of Amaxus, get in touch.

To find out more about how Amaxus is helping charities extend their reach and offering, see our charity and not-for-profit page.