Post-Transactional Experience with Heart

When someone donates to St. Jude, they should feel joy, that they contributed to a worthy cause.

Instead, they were met with a bare page, and received a very transactional email.

Confirmation Page to Thank you Page

Once someone completed their donation, they used to be met with a cold, sparse page. Information was very limited. If they made a monthly donation, there was no mention of that at all on the page. And CTAs were not relevant or appropriate to many donors. Analytics revealed that less than 1% used the social share. Conversations with donors taught us that this audience is not interesting in boasting about their altruism.

The new experience that I designed, included beautiful patient photography, a primary call to action to increase the value of their donation with employer matching, and ways to learn more or get involved. Since they would automatically receive an email receipt, I de-emphasized the Print a Receipt option by replacing with a link. Plus, I wanted to make it easy to get help and provide us with feedback so that we could continue to make the entire experience better.

Transactional Email to Heartfelt Notification

Their confirmation email was out-dated and missing a lot of information about the donation they just made (incentive or H&M related). And if they made a donation in honor or in memory, the applicable email to the donor and recipient were also cold.

And their receipt made no acknowledgement in they made the donation in honor or in memory of someone.

Based on what we heard from what donors expected to see after they completed their donation, we made major changes to every single part of the post-donation experience, including the confirmation page, print receipt, confirmation email, and emails for honor/memorial e-cards. It is now warm and a much better expression of gratitude for the gift they just made.

It also produced additional engagement opportunities, pushing donors toward a next action that is right for them.

My role:

• I made donations to over 20 other organizations to do a competitive analysis. I found that the St. Jude post-transactional experience was well below par in 2018-19.

• With the competitive review plus donor feedback, I advocated for prioritization of the updates to the post-transactional experience.

• Then I created wireframes and mockups of what the experience would look like for donors and H&M recipients.

• I ran usability testing to gathering feedback from donors on their feelings and attitude toward the experiences.

• I advocated for making use of some much more flexible components in our content management system for the Thank You page so that we could easily update the page since. This has served as a extremely helpful foundation that we have iterated on many times since the initial effort in 2019.