Plan International is one of the largest global international aid organizations in the world. They have made a direct impact on the lives of 21.6 million girls through a unique approach to community development and gender equality, known as the GirlEngage approach. Online, Plan International drives its mission by engaging people to sponsor a child, creating peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns, giving gifts of hope, and digital advocacy. Struggling with an old website, Plan asked Constructive to transform their efforts by redesigning their digital ecosystem from the ground up.
When Plan approached Constructive, the organization was suffering with an old website on a proprietary CMS that made site management a burden. The integrations into the critical systems that drive their fundraising and allow sponsors to interact with the children they support were haphazard and difficult to use, hurting business operations and intelligence. Plan needed a new, content-rich website to tell the stories of the individuals they support globally and drive action and revenue. Together, we built a dynamic and rich site that will continue to support Plan’s engagement and fundraising goals for years to come.
Plan International USA’s website was over 7 years old when we started the project, and it was showing its age. The typography, page layouts, and the overall design no longer lived up to Plan’s recently redesigned brand. Usability was poor—particularly when it came to vital donation and eCommerce experiences. On the backend, the proprietary CMS used to build their website by a previous agency prevented Plan’s team from effectively managing and growing their site. Taken together, Plan was stuck with a website that was undermining their brand to audiences around the world, causing an under-performance of online fundraising goals, and making their team’s lives a nightmare when it came to publishing and maintenance.
We kicked off our project with a robust discovery process, using surveys, interviews, and desk research to understand the situation as it was—and most importantly, the way that Plan International USA wanted it to be. We then led collaborative strategy workshops to co-create an executable strategy. Plan’s team had three high-priority goals that became the foundation for our work. First was to strengthen their brand by elevating Plan’s unique “GirlEngage” approach to development. Second was to create a trans-media storytelling platform that could be leveraged across the organization’s direct mail and other fundraising efforts. Third, we aimed to create more personalized experiences for child sponsors and donors through an engaging, intuitive, and easy-to-use eCommerce platform that would convert.
Through the GirlEngage development approach on the Plan website, adolescent girls can become the drivers of change. Girls know the changes they need in their lives, and Plan listens and facilitates those changes with audience support.
Plan International USA’s website is a content-rich experience that tells the organization’s brand narrative, explains its theory of change and approach to impact, and features written, visual, and video stories of the girls and communities it is dedicated to. It’s also a complex e-commerce platform and donor portal that offers numerous ways for supporters to give, including sponsoring children and building meaningful online relationships, making specific gifts or recurring donations, starting peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns, and more. We created a content strategy and designed a conversion-focused user experience for an engaging website that introduces Plan to new audiences, converts people into sponsors, and then provides donors with a dedicated portal to deepen their relationship and support.
Visually, Plan International USA’s new website expands its established brand to create visually dynamic online experiences that both tell its story and the story of the children it supports around the world. Rich with imagery, texture, and animation, the website design creates a warm, inviting, and immersive brand experience. And to reinforce its mission, custom collages with silhouetted profiles center audiences on the girls and women around the world that Plan works to empower.
The women and girls Plan works with are central figures throughout Plan’s new website, further highlighting Plan’s GirlEngage approach and direct impact in communities globally.
Constructive’s approach to brand strategy and experience for nonprofits emphasizes increasing the feeling of an organization’s proximity to where change happens. This way, supporters can feel more emotionally connected to the mission. At every level in the experience, we designed Plan’s website to bring people closer to their work—transporting them to the different regions around the world, and bringing them closer to the young people looking for help to realize their dreams.
A focus on sharing unique personal experiences in an uplifting and engaging way is especially important in supporting the Plan’s Sponsor a Child program. Through images, key information about each child’s life, and strong drives to action, Plan provides long-term funding solutions for individual children across more than thirty countries. The same storytelling principles are then applied across Plan’s website to share information about the project’s impact on project pages and within blog insights.
Plan International USA’s website is a large, dynamic marketplace that provides multiple different ways to support girls and Plan’s mission—all of which are powered by an e-commerce cart-to-checkout experience that we built from the ground up, and which integrates with Blackbaud, Luminate, and Salesforce. We designed a giving platform that’s visually rich and invites people to explore and encourages giving—and then converts by emphasizing clear, direct-response design best practices that make every action intuitive.
