Driving donations for Koshish Educational & Welfare Society India with Drupal

Koshish Educational & Welfare Society is a non-profit organization that has been working for more than a decade to make a significant and large-scale contribution to the education of underprivileged children. They have dedicated their mission to improving the lives of underprivileged children and families. They aimed to revamp their design and architecture and improve their admin and user experience to advance their mission. OpenSense Labs built the new KEWS website on Drupal. The new architecture helped them move faster without developer support. Post-development, the website required support & maintenance to function properly. The aim for support and maintenance helped them make their website user-friendly & fix bugs.

Like most NGOs, KEWS faced 3 challenges affecting their growth.

• Lack of engagement from users on the website
• Poor conversions on donations
• Slow load speed

While it is easier for NGOs to ignore website upkeep, KEWS wanted to leverage its website as a potential tool to advance its mission. They wanted to tackle these issues efficiently and within their limited resources. 

The goal was therefore to improve on these challenges via enhanced website design, tracking conversions, and optimizing website performance. 

• Design & architecture revamp: This covered the clean-up of the visual design and structure of the website. Website redesign aimed to improve user engagement & relevance to users across devices. It also focussed on improving the admin interface so non-technical members could create visual layouts without being dependent on developers.
• Support and Maintenance: Fix bugs to ensure a smoother user experience.

 Lack of engagement from users on the website

• To improve website engagement, a complete redesign of the website was undertaken. Multiple steps were taken to improve user engagement, such as providing the option to add optimized multimedia content in the proper image format. 
• The testimonials and feature banner section have been recreated with a sliding feature for a better user experience.
• The image lightbox module was used to add higher resolution, which improved user retention on the website.
• Facilitated an easy video upload feature in the ‘Announcements’ section that updates the visitors with the latest initiatives in more engaging ways.
• Other improvements, like adding a time stamp to the events section, and simplifying the user registration process now make it easy for users to onboard with their initiative. 
• Lighthouse, a third-party Google extension, is integrated to achieve improved website performance and overall user experience. This tool helped the KEWS team to identify steps to optimize it without any developer help.

Poor conversions on donations

• Introduced admin analytics to track active users and conversions on the website.
• To improve donations, a “Donate now” pop-up was added across the website. Drupal’s modal module was used to add pop-ups to the website. Further, the design of the “Donate now” tab on the home page was improved to improve its visibility. 
  
  
• Created an easy-to-use admin interface to allow non-technical users to create pop-ups for different campaigns. We used Drupal’s Counter module to implement real-time analytics on the website to track the website visits and also made it user-friendly for the admin to access the dashboard without any technical knowledge. These features combined allowed site admins to have a holistic overview across campaigns and users.
• Integrated clear labels and fields in the donate now page (Rs. 1000, 2000, 4000) to allow users to donate on the go. Added a QR code to the donation page to simplify the process further. 

Slow load speed

• We followed Google Page Speed Insights to improve the site speed score and optimized its performance as per global standards. Assessed core web vitals on desktop and mobile devices. Used content multiplication at different locations with the help of a content delivery network (CDN) to enhance page load time and optimize content delivery. 
• We minimized larger size HTML and CSS files to improve the site speed and reduced the number of HTTP requests for various assets like images, scripts, and CSS files. This improved website performance and overall user experience. We also minimized the inclusion of external scripts that help the overall website load faster. 
• Drupal’s blazy module was integrated to assist in bandwidth conservation, improved page load time, reduce page weight, and allowed better page load. We capitalized on caching to allow browsers to pre-load some of the content to speed up webpage delivery. Cache played an important role in loading static content faster like images and media files that eventually speed up the website. 

Bug fixes

• We first monitored server logs and load every 3 hours to check for any abnormal behavior and to understand where the website was having the major bug issues. We identified the root cause and resolved it in a timely manner. 
• Constant monitoring of Drupal logs was done for unreported errors on the website and rectified them. 
• All identified website bugs and errors were fixed to enhance the website's performance.