Los Angeles Philharmonic

The typical donation path through a performing arts website goes something like this:

• Select an amount – and often a fund or other designation for the contribution.
• Answer a load of questions about the donation: Is it a tribute? In honor of someone else? Part of a special campaign?
• Add it to the cart.
• And ... finally, checkout – which can open a whole other path of user frustrations, like needing to register an account or reset a password.

Often, there are many additional requests for information that get added into the donation path online because the journey must meet the needs of a wide variety of donors. The result is a sometimes overwhelming interrogation covering everything from how donors would like to be recognized, to whether they wish to receive information about other ways to contribute in the future.

The LA Phil wanted to turn this on its head. How could we create the fastest, most seamless user journey for a patron making an online gift? 

This project was initiated and planned prior to the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, but was brought into focus by the need, as the LA Phil shut its doors, to provide an easy-to-use channel to collect contributions from its supporters.

We wanted to consider the donation journey holistically, starting from the moment that users landed on the site, right through to making a donation. The LA Phil have used our BlocksOffice online purchase path platform for a number of years, and had been using a standard flow where the user could add a donation to their cart, select additional options and then checkout. 

As part of our work in 2019 to adopt the rest of the web estate over to our preferred Silverstripe CMS platform, we also considered the design of the membership and giving related pages, which needed re-thinking in the context of the LA Phil’s friends and membership offer.

The LA Phil team had received feedback from users that the path was often counter-intuitive, and felt like a donation journey shoehorned into a ticket purchase path – which was not surprising, because it was.

One of the key benefits of our BlocksOffice platform is that it is highly customisable and extensible to meet the needs of the most complex performing arts and cultural organisations. We took advantage of this to rethink the core donation journey:

• Using a templated URL structure, users could jump straight to the ‘cart’ from a series of embeddable widgets and interfaces around the website. This gave CMS editors a lot of control over how to present donation campaigns in different ways around the website, including tracking fund, campaign and source all the way through the transaction.
  
• We moved all of the questions typically asked about a donation — desired recognition name, memorial information, requests for other information, etc. — to the confirmation screen. Users were asked for this information only after they had made a donation, and any updates to this data were passed through to Tessitura after the contribution was processed.
  
• We also reviewed the cart and checkout process for any language that was not specific to a gift, and — if a web order contains only a donation — the cart removes references to ‘order’ and replaces them with ‘gift’ (e.g. ‘Your Order’ becomes ‘Your Gift’).
  
• Parallel projects had already taken place to improve the general checkout experience on the LA Phil site, including the addition of quick pay options such as Apple Pay (using Tessitura’s Windcave integration) and PayPal. These options appeared in the donation ‘cart’ and allowed a user to quickly pay using these methods. This meant that a user could go from a donation widget embedded on a homepage, to having made a gift, in just a few taps and a glance at their device.

On the design side, we created new templates to present the highly structured information that goes into the membership benefits pages, and made sure these were both easily navigable and easily understood on all device sizes. 

• As with many membership structures, the LA Phil allows users to give any amount within a range to benefit from a specific membership level. This means that the interface needs to accept any donation amount, but also make it easy for users to pick certain donation amounts to trigger a membership level selection
• We also restructured the pages in the Support section to make them more easily navigable and understandable by users.
• It was also important to provide a number of ‘jumping off’ points from various pages into the donation journey. This was done by designing widgets that could be included on almost any page on the site, configured with a fund and source ID, and allowed the user to select how much they wanted to give before being redirected to the ‘cart’ to complete their transaction using Apple Pay, PayPal or a standard credit card checkout.
• One of the most effective implementations of these enhancements formed part of an alert banner that was added to the project in the later stages, as Covid-19 hit. This alert told users that the venues were closed, but that their support was needed to support the organisation in these difficult times. The alert itself became a donation widget, where users could select a donation amount straight away and seamlessly move through the checkout process.