Do For Children Website Development

Fall 2020

Develop for Good is an intercollegiate technology/design organization that aims to generate social good by providing web app and development services with non-profits. Some of our most notable partners include UNICEF, the World Bank, the Nature Conservancy and the World Health Organization. Check us out at https://www.developforgood.org/!

Project Summary

Do For Children is a non-profit organization based in Malawi that has been conducting youth and community empowerment projects since 2017. They received official non-profit status from the government of Malawi earlier this year. They partnered with Develop For Good so that volunteers could help them make a strong online presence.

Over the course of Fall 2020 semester, we designed a website for them from scratch so that they are able to highlight their work and current projects well and increase the number of donations as well as sponsorship for Malawian children.We designed a website to enable youth empowerment in Malawi, especially for adolescent girls. At the end of the project, we were able to deliver a fully functional website hosted on WiX where people can navigate all different types of information about Do For Children — from their mission statement to current projects to volunteer opportunities and also be able to donate and sponsor through PayPal.

The Challenge

Since the team behind Do For Children did not really have an online presence, their organization had very limited exposure. Having a website discoverable on Google creates a pathway for the organization to receive more support, financial as well as volunteer-related, to give continuity to their mission. It also allows them to show regular updates regarding their projects by giving people the option of subscribing to their newsletters and also linking to their social media pages.

When we first spoke with our clients, they identified their target user groups as community members interested in their events/mission as well as potential donors from all around the world. To make sure that the website was accessible to these two target groups, we had to ensure the website was easy to navigate through and contain the necessary information that would help them trust the organization. Since it was our client’s first time working with a web design team, we were also asked to research on how other non-profits presented themselves so we could take inspiration and advise the client regarding suitable content for the website (including images, user interaction etc.)

One of the biggest challenges we faced during the project was enabling donation features on the website. Since a lot of reputed website-builders consider people living in the Global North as their target audience, it was quite challenging to integrate a payment option to the website as our clients were based in the Global South. A donation feature was our client’s biggest priority as one of their main objectives of the website was increasing their fund-raising opportunities. In the end, although we weren’t able to integrate credit card payments due to location restrictions, we managed to enable donations through PayPal.

The Team

Priyanka Dangol (PM), Grinnel ‘22
Angela Yu, Columbia ‘22
Anika Ahluwalia, Brown ‘23
Betsy Li, Occidental, ‘20
Klaire Pham, Vassar ‘24
Selma Rafiqi, Brooklyn ‘21

Our Solution

For organization of general documents, we used Google Drive as a common ground where both our team as well as our client could upload images/content document/PDFs etc. We also used other Google Services such as Docs and Spreadsheet to keep track of our progress and go back and forth with our clients regarding the content for the website.

For design purposes, we primarily used Balsamiq Cloud to collaborate on low-fidelity wireframes and conduct phase 1 of user testing as well as Figma to implement high-fidelity prototypes and conduct phase 2 of user testing. As Balsamiq is a low-fidelity design space we were able to try out different designs and implement feedback from each other/clients very quickly. While we mainly focused on the placements of different website elements in Balsamiq, we were able to solidify the feel of our website by experimenting with different images/fonts/colors through Figma. For the final website, as we didn’t have any developers on our team, we used WiX to transfer our design.

Our Impact

This website will increase the visibility of Do For Children and hopefully bring in more financial support to help them have a greater impact in the Malawian society.