JustGiving inspire mobile users
and make charitable giving even easier
JustGiving are a UK-based online fundraising organisation with technology that makes it simple, safe and inspiring to give money to causes. Founded in 2001, JustGiving built the world’s first online fundraising page, a radically easy way for member organisations to raise money and collect Gift Aid. JustGiving also help fundraisers create and build a community of supporters, using social media to get their stories out. More than 13,000 charitable organisations raise funds using the JustGiving platform.
Benefits It’s now simple and fast for mobile users to discover causes related to their interests and affiliations, and to give money. Member charities provide rich content to inspire people to give by showing how their generosity can change the world for the better. The new mobile app is expected to increase net giving, and engage new supporters who are more likely to use their mobile phones than other channels. Lean and Agile allowed the team to deliver the application to the App store in just eight weeks. Use of the Calatrava framework will make building an Android version faster by leveraging core logic with the iOS app while allowing the Android native UI.
The Concept: A mobile app to serve both fundraisers and supporters Within their technology suite, JustGiving already had native mobile apps for both iPhone and Android users, aimed at fundraisers. The apps enabled fundraisers to update their JustGiving pages, post to Facebook and Twitter, monitor fundraising progress and receive notifications when new donations were received. The apps helped supporters indirectly, by making it easier for the fundraisers to post news about progress as well as how their money was helping others. But supporters (and potential supporters) couldn’t use the apps themselves, and JustGiving wanted to change that.
Technology Stack: iOS, Calatrava, JavaScript, HTML 5 Build: TeamCity, GitHub Testing: TestFlight, Jasmine, JsLint Analytics: MixPanel
They wanted to make it simple and fast for mobile users to give money, and discover new (and old) causes related to their interests and affiliations through a process of personalisation. They also wanted to let fundraisers provide rich content directly to users’ phones, to inspire people to give by showing how their generosity could change the world. Knowing ThoughtWorks from work on another of their products, JustGiving asked the global IT consultancy to become their technology partner on this new one as well.
Eight-week Innovation Lab JustGiving had a short eight-week timeframe planned to deliver the new app. ThoughtWorks brought an Innovation Lab approach to the problem, and led with a series of short visioning and planning exercises. The entire team (a delivery manager, business and quality analyst, user experience and three application developers from ThoughtWorks and the product owner, a designer and a developer from JustGiving) participated to make sure everyone supported a shared understanding of the product goals.
Over the course of two days, ThoughtWorks led everyone through exercises including development of an “elevator pitch,” creating user personas, and empathy mapping. The team gained agreement and common understanding of the overall objectives, product scope, high-level user journeys and the technical approach. Lean canvas methods were then used to create a tactical plan to guide the team all the way from ideation to building a successful product.
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We were the world’s first online fundraising business, making donations simpler and safer for everyone. And we’re proud to say we’ve been growing the world of giving ever since: innovating with companies, charities and developers; investing our fees in world-class technology; and helping raise over £1 billion for thousands of charities.
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Founders Zarine Kharas and Anne-Marie Huby.
www.thoughtworks.com
By the end of the first week, the team had enough experience from the completed technical spikes and user stories to make a realistic scope projection for the first release, given the overall eight-week timeframe. Based on that, the team decided to focus on the iOS app for the first release, since usage analytics showed it would have a much larger audience, and tackle the Android app in the future.
Guerilla testing helps get real world feedback, fast The team worked in weekly iterations, incrementally building all the requisite elements of the new app. The technical team members worked with the designer and product owner throughout to evaluate tradeoffs between a richer user experience and more functionality, to achieve the best overall balance within the app given the time. One of the principles of the Lean approach is to get value released into the market as quickly as possible, so extending the timeframe to put more and more into the app was not desired. Rather, the team agreed to get the initial product delivered, keeping a backlog of ideas and also learning from the users of the new app what was most important to them for future releases. Within the first week, guerilla user testing events were being conducted in order to get feedback from potential users and confirm the design was on the right track. Some team members would go across the road to a nearby commuter train station, and get feedback while filming people as they tried to use the prototype app. This process supplemented lab testing throughout the project to test new ideas or design changes, and proved to be a fast, inexpensive and effective way to connect with potential users and get their impressions along with concrete data about usability.
ThoughtWorks uses cutting edge Calatrava JustGiving placed a premium on a high quality user experience, which usually means building individual native applications— an approach that can be expensive and time consuming. ThoughtWorks developers used a technical architecture for the iOS app that would enable JustGiving to build the Android version of the new app at a later time, faster and at lower cost than otherwise, and without compromising the native UI, by using the Calatrava framework. Calatrava is an open source framework developed at ThoughtWorks that allows developers to build mobile apps with high quality native user interfaces, but with core logic that is shared, lowering multi-platform effort. Meeting the planned eight-week schedule, the team released the new iOS application to the App store and shortly afterward the app was live to the public.
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Partnering with ThoughtWorks not only delivered a delightful app quickly, but left an architecture we can continue to invest in and gave us the opportunity to try new development practices.
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www.thoughtworks.com
Richard Atkinson - CIO
Custom software experts ThoughtWorks – A company wholly devoted to the art and science of custom software. We make it, and we make our clients better at it. Our bottom line is to design and deliver software fast and predictably. Doing enterprise-scale software is tough, but the returns to those organisations that can deliver – on target – are tremendous. ThoughtWorks’ products division offers tools to manage the entire Agile development lifecycle through its Adaptive ALM solution™ comprised of Mingle®, Go™ and Twist®. ThoughtWorks employs 2,000 professionals to serve clients from offices in Australia, Brazil, China, Germany, India, Singapore, South Africa, Uganda, the United Kingdom and the United States. We lead the industry in rapid, reliable and efficient custom software development. When you need an expert partner to help you get ahead and stay ahead of the competition, get in touch.
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