Making it easy to back a real person

ACCI Missions & Relief is an Australian Christian missions and relief organization that runs projects all over the world. They came to us wanting to get more out of their website: to show the work they do, and to give supporters an easy way to find and back the specific field workers and projects in the countries where they work.

This one was a build, not a design job, and I want to be straight about that. ACCI's own designer provided the design. We were the technology implementers, and I was hands-on in the code.

What they needed it to do

Two things had to work. Giving had to be smooth, and supporters had to be able to find the person or project they cared about. ACCI's model is personal. Supporters back named field workers, real people living and working in communities around the world. A generic website flattens that. The site had to keep it.

Built to work across devices, from a supporter's desktop to their phone.

What we built

We built the site on Liferay and wrote a set of custom integrations to make the giving work the way ACCI expected, with the payment flows matching their process rather than forcing them onto ours. The bigger piece of custom work was the directory: an easy-to-search index of ACCI's projects and people, with a filter tool so a supporter could narrow down to the field worker or project they wanted and give directly.

The field-worker and partner directory, with a filter tool so a supporter could find and back a specific person.

The design belonged to ACCI. What we owned was whether it actually worked: whether a payment went through cleanly, and whether someone who wanted to support one particular field worker could find them in a few clicks and do it. That is the part that turns a nice-looking site into one that raises support for real people doing real work.