Persona 01
The committed advocate.
Already engaged. Wants to donate, sign petitions, and volunteer, and needs to see where the money goes.
RETURNING
DONATES
ACCOUNTABILITY
WWF Canada
Our redesign of the mobile donation funnel lifted WWF-Canada's digital donations 37%, then unified four fragmented platforms into one WordPress multisite.
Nonprofit
·
Enterprise
·
Website redesign
At a glance
Four phases. Four platforms. One system.
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team
4 person
Design Director, UX Designer, Front-end Developer, Project Manager
research
9 user groups
3 personas · 1 trust architecture
output
1 multisite
Site, store, Living Planet portals
Standard
WCAG 2.0 AA
Built in, not retrofitted
The Client
Canada's largest international conservation organization.
WWF · Nonprofit
WWF-Canada is the Canadian arm of one of the world's most recognized environmental organizations, founded in 1967 and working to protect wildlife, habitats, and the ecosystems Canadians depend on across the Arctic, oceans, freshwater, and species conservation.
Its website is not a brochure. It is the front door for donors, the checkout for online and mobile giving, and the operational hub for campaigns that respond to conservation issues in real time. By 2018, that front door had stopped keeping pace with the mission behind it.
1967
Founded, Toronto Ontario
Bilingual
Canada-wide, English and French
118K+
Site users per quarter before redesign
The Challenge
The site was losing people at the exact moment they decided to act.
A high-traffic site with almost no depth of engagement, running on a patchwork of platforms, was leaking donation intent at the highest-value point in the journey.
Problem 01
A fragmented, aging ecosystem.
The main site ran on ColdFusion. A store microsite, three separate Living Planet supporter portals, and a set of campaign properties had each been built at different times, on different systems. A supporter met a different organization on every property.
Problem 02
An underperforming mobile donation funnel.
Mobile carried a third of traffic and behaved like a different site, bouncing far higher and converting far lower than desktop, exactly where giving was headed.
Problem 03
A backend that slowed the team.
Routine content changes required a developer, so campaigns moved at engineering speed rather than conservation speed.
Problem 04
Strict global brand constraints.
WWF operates one of the most tightly governed brand systems in the nonprofit world, shared across every international chapter. Usability and conversion had to improve without redrawing the visual language.
Problem 05
Mission-critical, with a compliance deadline.
The site was not served over HTTPS, page load ranked below average, and WCAG 2.0 Level AA would become legally required under AODA on January 1, 2021. Any failure landed directly on donor trust and fundraising.
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Before / After
Same donation flow, rebuilt for The moment of Giving.
Drag the handle to see how the mobile donation funnel changed, from a distraction-heavy checkout that lost supporters mid-decision into a streamlined flow built to convert.
Before
After WANDR
Our Role
From redesign to rebuilt foundation.
01
Product strategy and UX audit
02
User research, information architecture, site map, and content map
03
Art direction and brand guidelines within WWF's global system
04
UI/UX design across roughly 30 templates and the full donation funnel
05
Usability testing and a reusable design system
06
Responsive front-end development, mobile first
07
WordPress multisite build, hosting, SSL, CDN, and bilingual configuration
08
WCAG accessibility built in, and Living Planet portal unification
Research
We measured the funnel
before we rebuilt it.
A documented Website Review and Strategy, commissioned by WWF-Canada from Bits Creative Agency, established the pre-redesign baseline from Google Analytics and FullStory across three months in 2018. WANDR carried its own UX audit into the engagement and designed against that evidence.
01
conversion
Great at being found, poor at being acted on.
Organic search drove 63% of sessions but converted at just 0.28%, against 1.21% for direct traffic and 2.80% for email. The site excelled at attracting people and failed at moving them to give.
02
Drop-off
148,000 sessions, 121,000 drop-offs.
Bounce sat at 69% against a 40% ideal, with the average visitor seeing 1.88 pages and leaving after 1 minute 35 seconds. Engagement was shallow across the board.
03
Mobile revenue
The money was leaking on mobile.
Mobile carried 34.7% of traffic but generated CA$7,035 against desktop's CA$45,906, bouncing at 75% with 49-second sessions. The fastest-growing surface was the weakest.
Nine audiences, four different asks.
Persona 02
The first-time giver.
New to the cause, often younger. A curious browser who wants a fast, low-friction way in and does not know where to start.
NEW USER
YOUNGER
Speed-first
Persona 03
The major giver.
Philanthropist or corporate sponsor weighing a sizeable gift. Wants strategic plans, successes, financials, and a person to talk to.
High-value
wants proof
roi
Persona 03
The researcher.
Student, scientist, or policy lead hunting data. Lands deep on species and science pages, reads long, and rarely converts on the visit.
Species & science
Reads long
Low intent
Persona 03
Job Hunter.
Drawn by the prestige of the brand. Needs careers, leadership, and credibility signals.
Peer-driven
Social play
Community-led
Persona 03
Corporate Professional.
Decision maker evaluating sponsorship. Wants annual reports, financials, and return on investment before any conversation.
Peer-driven
Social play
Community-led
Consolidate the platform. Rebuild the moment of giving.
Hand back the keys.
3 Principles →
Principle 01Trust
01
Unify.
Move off ColdFusion onto a single WordPress multisite, bringing the store, campaign properties, and the three Living Planet portals under one brand-compliant system, so the experience no longer changed depending on which door a supporter entered through.
Principle 02Segment
02
Convert.
Rebuild the funnel around how supporters actually decide. Strip distraction from the donation page, cut steps between intent and completion, surface recurring giving as a first-class option, and preselect suggested amounts anchored to the CA$61 average. Every decision was made against mobile first, because that was where the money was being lost.
Principle 03Bingo
03
Enable.
Deliver a modular content system so internal teams could launch campaigns and restructure pages without opening a developer ticket, and without breaking global brand standards. The redesigned flows were codified in a reusable design system with accessibility built in from the first decision, so consistency held across the multisite and engineers reused components instead of rebuilding them.
Principle 01 of → Continue scrolling
THE KEY INSIGHT
The problem was never traffic. It was everything after the click.
WWF.ca was excellent at being found and poor at converting the people it found. And because the global brand was locked, the gains could not come from a new look. They had to come from architecture, hierarchy, and funnel design.
That is the harder version of the problem, and the more repeatable one: a better donation flow recovers revenue once, but a platform the team can run recovers it continuously.
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Outcomes
What the work moved.
By the end of the engagement, WWF-Canada had a rebuilt donation funnel, a single brand-compliant platform, and internal teams who could run it.
01 · Donations
+37%
Increase in digital donations
via the mobile-first funnel redesign
via the mobile-first funnel redesign
02 · Reach
+91%
Monthly organic visits, 2018 to 2021 increased from 76,000 to 145,000
03 · System
4 → 1
Platforms unified into one multisite
site, store, Living Planet portals
site, store, Living Planet portals
04 · Speed
3x
Faster campaign launches
developer dependency removed
developer dependency removed
Donation figure reflects WWF-reported impact from the redesigned funnel. Traffic figures are from Semrush (wwf.ca); organic keyword footprint over the same window grew from roughly 37,600 to 53,700 ranking terms.
Client Voice
In their words.
“
We've seen a lot more traffic coming to WWF.ca since the redesign… and our conversion rate on our donor forms is up thanks to Wandr's new designs.
Vanessa Turpin
Senior Manager, Digital Marketing, WWF-Canada
