Greek Life Olympics Donation Platform Case Study
The creation of the Greek Life Olympics website.
Project Date: August 2023 — May 2024
My Role: Developer
Project Overview: For our Emerging Media Capstone project, we partnered with The Backpack Project of Athens, a student-run non-profit at UGA whose mission is to help ease the burden of homelessness in Athens, Georgia. One way they do this is by hosting an annual fundraiser called the Greek Life Olympics, or GLO for short, where UGA Greek Life chapters compete as teams to try to bring in the most donations. Our project is a designated donation platform exclusively for the fundraiser.
The Problem: Our client had used a different donation platform in the past and found their users had trouble with the interface, leading to a decrease in participation, and therefore donations.
They wanted a new website that would allow their users to…
- Make team donations quickly and easily
- Track team progress in comparison to other Greek Life chapters
- Allow users to access more information about GLO, such as upcoming volunteer opportunities and events
The overall goal of the website is to increase team participation and donations, as well as general understanding and awareness of the event.
The Solution:
Our solution is a website that caters to the specific needs of all of our audiences: The Backpack Project of Athens members, Greek Life members, and donors. We needed a website that would be both easy to build, use, and pass on to future Backpack Project of Athens members. It also needs to have a simple and intuitive user layout that allows for easy access to team pages and the donation features, as well as more information on the organization for those looking to get more involved.
Brand Design
Additionally, we spent a lot of time developing a cohesive and easily recognizable design system for the Greek Life Olympics. We wanted something that stood apart from their parent organization, The Backpack Project of Athens, and that pulled in elements from Greek Life as well as the actual Olympics, to better represent the competitive and lively spirit of the event.
For a more in-depth overview of our design choices, you can find the case study here and our full Design System below.
Research
Before settling on a website, we did research into whether an application or website would be more beneficial to our users both short and long term, and found that about 70% of our users preferred a website. We also did extensive research into existing online donation platforms to see what features users really liked, as well as what they had trouble with. Our client had used Give Lively in the past, but, as stated before, had trouble getting their users involved with the clunky and unappealing interface. They did not want to hire a developer full time, so we knew we needed a platform that would be easy to pass on for them to manage future iterations.
Solutions
After looking into many different website builders, we chose to create our website using Weebly due to it’s user-friendly interface. It was important that we chose a platform that our client would be able to easily use to in the future.
Additionally, Weebly’s compatibility with custom code allowed us to seamlessly integrate a donation plugin from Donorbox. We found that this was the best way to securely collect donations and donor information in a way that our client and potential donors would feel comfortable with.
One of the biggest challenges our client had with their previous site was that the creation of team profiles was a lengthy and challenging process that deterred many Greek Life members.
Now all Greek Life chapters on campus, regardless of whether or not they decide to participate, have a team page that we have created on the back-end of the website. If an organization chooses to participate, their already created team page can be easily activated on the website. This makes participation in GLO easy and hassle-free.
We also implemented a leaderboard to allow teams and individuals to track organization donations, as well as overall money raised. We want to create a fun and community oriented website, but with a little bit of competition to make participation more rewarding. The leaderboard is hand coded and will display the top five fraternities or sororities who have raised the most money throughout the Greek Life Olympic fundraising period.
The rest of our development centered around information about The Backpack Project’s mission and how to get involved. We included an overview of The Backpack Project, volunteer opportunities, and upcoming events to provide context for donors and keep Greek Life members informed in one accessible location.
Results:
After launching a test version of our website with all these new features, we conducted testing with our target audiences: current & past Greek Life members and potential donors.
Our main research goal was to determine if our new site adequately addressed the concerns that The Backpack Project had with their previous site.
We tested the following hypotheses:
- Users can donate efficiently and securely.
- Teams can clearly see their donation progress in comparison with the donation progress of other teams.
- Users can easily find information about the GLO and TBP.
Utilizing an array of testing tools, including pre and post test surveys, success metric and timed tasks, and a system usability scale, we gained valuable insights. The results were illuminating, revealing issues we hadn’t previously recognized.
Among the challenges identified were a general lack of understanding about the event, a desire for more visual prompts, and frustration and confusion stemming from an excess of buttons on the team page. To tackle these issues, we enhanced the homepage with more comprehensive information about the Greek Life Olympics, added more event photos for personalization, and introduced a search bar at the top of the team page for swift navigation.
On the flip side, the positive feedback we received was encouraging. We found that 100% of users said they would use the website again, with 92% praising the ease and swiftness of the donation process. Additionally, the success rate for various user tasks reached 96%. Overall, with the feedback we received and the changes we made, we determined the site was a success and addressed the issues our clients, the Greek Life members, and the potential donors faced.
We are happy to present the final version of our site, set to hand over to our client for next year’s Spring 2025 Greek Life Olympics.