Heart of England Forest Digital Design

The Heart of England Forest approached me with a very unique situation. They needed to generate public awareness of the forest they are aiming to plant, as well as secure financial donations towards their cause via a subscription model. To achieve this direct email marketing formed a significant part of their strategy, initiating donors through several different enrolment campaigns and followed up with corresponding retention campaigns and administration messaging. I was commissioned by the client to design and code the numerous device-responsive email communications needed to create inlets to the donor funnel, spanning a variety of campaigns including their National Launch, their Open Day at the grounds and gardens, the distribution of their summer and autumn family activity packs and many more.

As mentioned earlier The Heart Of England Forest acquire their donations through a subscription model managed by third party digital platform. The platform offers a comprehensive solution for constituent data transaction, but out of the box it didn't wholly cater to the needs of my Client. The ability to donate for particular causes (in this case different tree-based products and services) as well as beneficiary gifting all crucial yet unsupported features.

I was commissioned to design and develop a series of trafficking pages that would point users towards each of the donation products as well as a series of transaction pages that integrated with the constituent platform. Essentially I needed to provide the bridge between the donation marketing and the transaction phase of the sales funnel.

In terms of development this project was quite an undertaking. First came building the product pages from which a user would need to commence the purchasing process. Some of these pages needed adaptable donation fields, so I had to write the front-end logic allowing users to select predefined donation values or input their own. Next I had to extend the limits of the platform's input process by building a layer that translated a user's purchase choice (i.e. a tree planting day, a tree tag etc.) into a formatted series of variables that would otherwise fall outside the scope of the software. The variables then triggered a dynamically mutated donation form based on the user's purchase choice. Finally, once the platform had processed the transaction off site, I also had to tie up the funnel by serving a relevant 'thank you' notification and confirmation email.