Redesigning Rmhc.org

Ronald McDonald House Charities® (RMHC) creates, finds and supports programs that directly improve the health and wellbeing of children and their families. These programs help millions of families stay together and provide accommodations near leading hospitals and health care services worldwide, ensuring they have access to the medical care their child needs while staying emotionally and physically involved in their child’s care.

RMHC’s global website serves as a hub for valuable information about programs, volunteering, corporate partnership, donations and more. They wanted to shift platforms to allow for simpler functionality and updates, and took it as an opportunity to completely redesign their website. We had the honor of working with this dedicated and impactful charity to reimagine and deliver a more engaging and memorable experience for every visitor and donor.

Opportunity
RMHC’s goal in redesigning their site was to better communicate their global reach, impact of their programs and the value RMHC Global provides to Chapters and programs worldwide. They wanted to understand why people come to the global site and what potential donors look for when deciding to give to a charity. To achieve those goals, we were asked to rethink and recreate their website and online donation process to fit the needs of their visitors.

Outcome
Rmhc.org now provides donors and other site visitors with a more engaging and meaningful experience. Site visitors now can easily understand the impact of RMHC global and the programs it supports, find ways to get involved, see in-depth Chapter information and proceed with a more seamless donation process. Launching during a devastating pandemic made getting donations even more vital. Campaigns driving traffic to the new donation platform successfully led to an uptick in funding for RMHC global when they needed it most.

Driving compassion and action through more emotional content

To help achieve RMHC’s goals for their site, we utilized our research and content strategy to create a new, more compelling approach to copy and content. By shifting their style from straight, functional information to more “storytelling with heart,” we now provide visitors with immediate insight into the compassion, purpose and value of the organization.

We began by leading each section with one of RMHC’s “We believe…” statements that highlight different aspects of the charity’s mission. Flowing the content from those statements helps set a more emotionally engaging tone for potential donors and/or volunteers. We then carefully curated the section with:

• Relevant and informational content to educate visitors
• Strategically crafted interactive elements to help drive a deeper connection to RMHC’s opportunities
• Heartfelt stories of our families to reinforce the breadth and impact of RMHC’s programs

Our goal was two-fold: deliver a simple, meaningful visitor experience and create a deeper connection to and understanding of the organization from the very first site visit. Upon hearing the client’s feedback along with initial visitor responses, we’re proud to say, “Goal accomplished!”

Leading with impact

In speaking with many potential donors about what drives them to donate, we learned that an organization’s mission needs to be supported by proven metrics on their impact. Donors want to understand the scale at which the organization operates and how their donation will be used.

We provided prominent, in-context statistics throughout the site to ensure visitors could get a quick and direct understanding of RMHC’s reach. Potential donors no longer have to dig for data on their own and can feel informed about RMHC’s accomplishments and continued impact within seconds of visiting the site.

Embodying hopefulness through design

With a heartfelt mission of supporting families with sick children, the visual design of rmhc.org needed to convey a strong sense of hope, empathy and support. Keeping the focus on children’s wellbeing in mind, we centered the visual design around illustrations that would be reminiscent of a child’s drawing style.

By finding just the right balance of family imagery, professional yet playful illustrations and RMHC’s inviting color palette, the site’s design adequately portrayed a warm feeling of hope for children and their families around the world.

Perfecting the online giving process

Giving to an organization is often tiresome due to the many considerations donors have even before getting to the monotonous personal information sections. We aimed to alleviate the burden of completing long donation forms by looking for ways to simplify decision points and group content in a more digestible way. The resulting donation form was a multi-step process with visually distinct sections and selection-based interactions that hide any irrelevant fields.

In addition to the simplification goal, RMHC was looking to solicit more monthly donors to maintain resources for their programs year-round. From our research, we recognized how large of an ask the standard “make your one-time donation monthly” was. To make monthly giving more compelling, we prompted monthly giving as the last step of the form that suggested amounts that were a percentage of what they pledged as a one-time gift. This tactic, combined with dollar amount equivalencies and messaging around why monthly giving makes a difference, provides donors with a stronger case for supporting RMHC monthly.