Reimagining the Charity Profile

A charity profile is often a donor's first real interaction with an organization, and at CanadaHelps it hadn't been substantially refreshed in over six years. In that time, giving had gotten more competitive. Platforms like GoFundMe, Chimp, PayPal, and Facebook had reset what donors expected from an online donation experience.

This wasn't just a usability problem. Charity profiles generated close to 30% of CanadaHelps' total revenue, and conversion swung hard with the seasons. The work also landed in 2020, right as the pandemic drove a real surge in online giving. Whatever changed had to work at that scale, under real pressure, without disrupting a donation flow the business depended on.

The existing profile had the right information somewhere on the page. Donors just couldn't get to it. It wasn't clear who the charity was, what a donation would actually support, why CanadaHelps could be trusted with the transaction, or even where the donate button was.

Underneath that was a harder tension: thousands of charities used the same template, with wildly different levels of content, sophistication, and resources. Any fix had to work for a small volunteer-run charity and a national organization at once, without flattening either into something generic.

The brief was simple to state and hard to do: make the profile easier to trust and easier to act on. That meant strengthening trust in CanadaHelps itself, making charity information legible at a glance, smoothing the donation flow, and supporting repeat giving, all responsively and accessibly, without asking any charity to give up how they represented themselves.

The donors moving through this page weren't one audience. Some already knew and trusted the charitable sector, some were recurring givers, some just wanted a receipt before a tax deadline, some were splitting a donation across several causes at once. Before touching the page, I mapped what they shared instead of designing for all of them separately.

In Awareness & Research, someone is comparing charities and asking whether their money will actually reach the cause, which pointed to one real question: how do we get people to trust CanadaHelps as a place to give, at all. In Select & Donate, the page felt transactional and the donation button was hard to find. Post-donation, the biggest ask was simple: where's my tax receipt.

That reframed the project. I wasn't designing a better page. I was designing a better decision, one that had to earn trust before it could ask for anything.

I combined user research, competitive analysis, analytics, and behavioural data, including Hotjar heatmaps, scroll depth, and session recordings, and looked outside the nonprofit space too: how ecommerce sites reduce friction on a purchase, and how other platforms use verification badges and emotional copy to earn trust at a glance.

The donation form sat below content most donors never reached. Charity information that should have built trust was hard to find or inconsistently presented. Some pages leaned on real storytelling and others read like a form. Visual customization meant to help charities stand out was actively breaking accessibility for some of them. And nowhere on the page did anyone explain why CanadaHelps, specifically, was a safe place to give.

Trust became the organizing principle, not a layer added on top. Competitive research was consistent: donors give more readily to organizations that are clear about who they are, how they operate, and why they can be trusted. That became four concrete moves:

• —Give the charity's story and imagery room to actually breathe
• —Make credibility visible, including a CRA Registered badge where it applied
• —Explain plainly why donating through CanadaHelps is safe
• —Keep the path to donating visible instead of making people hunt for it

Charities customized their own profiles, and some existing sections couldn't be removed because organizations depended on them. The page also had to hit WCAG 2.0 AA ahead of Ontario's AODA deadline in January 2021, and it had to fit inside a flow the business wasn't willing to gamble on:

Because the profile carried this much revenue, it also couldn't ship as one big, irreversible bet. Every change needed a way to be proven before it became permanent.

I started by sketching directions by hand with the team before anything touched a screen, then explored several structural directions: fixed navigation on the left, then the right, versions that led with charity imagery, versions that moved the donation form higher or kept it persistently in view while scrolling. Each round got tested against the same two questions: does this make the charity easier to trust, and does it make donating easier to do. The direction that survived wasn't the first idea. It was the one that held up against both.

The donation form moved to the top right of the page, following ecommerce conventions, and stayed present across the About, Impact, and Campaign tabs so donors never lost their place mid-decision. The page was built responsively from the start rather than adapting a desktop design down to mobile as an afterthought. Charity imagery and storytelling got more visual weight to make the page feel less transactional, a CRA Registered badge made legitimacy visible at a glance, and campaign details, goal, end date, image, and the donation form itself, were surfaced above the fold instead of buried in copy.

Charities could still customize their page's colours, but customization was scoped to decorative elements only, so a charity's branding couldn't accidentally break text contrast or accessibility. A new footer section explained plainly why giving through CanadaHelps is safe, and the underlying system was built to flex for charities with very different amounts of content, including organizations that weren't directly registered with CanadaHelps and had no way to customize their page at all.

A better-looking page isn't automatically a better-performing one, especially on a surface generating this much revenue, so we didn't just ship it. I ran the redesign against the existing experience using Google Optimize, starting with only 25% of traffic on the new version, with a backup plan ready in case revenue dropped. That mattered more than usual. This rolled out during the pandemic's surge in online donations, one of the highest-stakes stretches CanadaHelps had seen, and there was no room to gamble on a hunch.

The new design saw more interaction in the heatmap data, especially on the Impact tab, along with more time spent on the page overall. The original still won on raw transaction volume, but the redesign generated more revenue overall, particularly on mobile, exactly the gap we'd set out to close. It moved to 100% of traffic after the test, and the team kept iterating from there.