One website doing two jobs that pull in opposite directions
The client
Advocacy for Human Value is a social advocacy organisation working across northern Nigeria on human rights, community development and a scholarship programme that reaches more than a thousand people.
The brief
A single site with two audiences who want completely different things. A donor arrives wanting to be convinced. A scholarship applicant arrives wanting to apply and get on with their day. Serving both from one homepage usually means serving neither.
Applications had been arriving by email, which is easy to lose and impossible to track, and there was no secure or credible way to take a donation online at all.
What we did
- Brand identity first. The tone had to work for donors and applicants at the same time, so we set that before designing anything.
- Separate paths from the first screen. A donor and an applicant see different routes immediately, rather than one homepage trying to be both.
- Secure donation handling built in properly, so giving online is safe and feels it.
- Application forms that store every submission in one place with the fields the programme actually needs, instead of an email into a void.
The result
Both donations and scholarship applications now run through the site. Applications are captured and trackable rather than scattered across an inbox, and giving no longer depends on a bank transfer followed by a message asking whether it arrived.
Why two audiences is harder than it sounds
A donor and an applicant want opposite things from the same page. A donor is being persuaded, so they need the story, the proof and a reason to trust that the money does what it says. An applicant is not being persuaded at all. They have already decided, they want the form, and every paragraph of persuasion between them and it is an obstacle.
Most organisations solve this by writing for the donor and leaving the applicant to hunt. We split the paths at the first screen instead, which costs a little homepage real estate and saves both audiences the experience of reading something written for somebody else.
In their words
“It was better than I imagined it to be.”
Fatima Habib, Founder and Executive Director, Advocacy for Human Value
Why the brand came first
An advocacy organisation has a tone problem before it has a design problem. Too corporate and donors wonder where the money goes. Too informal and institutional funders stop taking it seriously. Applicants need to feel welcome, and none of those pull in the same direction.
Settling that as brand work, before anyone opened a page layout, meant the website was an application of a decision rather than the place the decision got argued about.
