The Kids' Cancer Project

Background

The Kids’ Cancer Project is an Australian charity focused on finding cures for childhood cancer. Their aim is single-minded. To fund research programs dedicated to finding cures for childhood cancer. Ultimately, finding a cure is about saving children’s lives and ending the heartbreak childhood cancer brings to so many families.

Goals

The Kids’ Cancer Project has a very focused goal – to fund research programs that aim to end childhood cancer.

Thus, the main goal of the website project was to build a site that gave the organisation another source of donations. The site takes donations in 2 ways:

• Through a donation form mechanism that allows anyone to donate cash directly to the organisation
• Through the selling of incredibly cute teddy bears

When customers purchase teddy bears through the website, they can choose to either purchase the bear for themselves or a friend or have the bear directly sent to a special child sick in hospital. Either way, the proceeds from the sale go directly to the Kids’ Cancer Project’s continuing efforts to cure childhood cancers.

The site also provides the Kids Cancer Project a valuable new way to share and disseminate information. Further, as a new brand, it gives them valuable exposure and reach.

Longer term, the site will likely expand to include additional products and mechanisms for donations. It will also continue to look to expand the reach of the organisation and maintain its relationship with previous contributors.

Challenges

The biggest challenge in creating the Kids Cancer Project Website was to build something that was powerful with strong income generating potential whilst remaining on a strict timeline and within a strict budget. As a non-profit organisation, we wanted to deliver a high-value solution and incorporate a number of features in the site while retaining a reasonable budget.

In terms of timing, the site was designed and developed just before the Christmas 2011 season – a crucial time for fundraising organisations. As such, the website needed to be designed and developed in a very short amount of time in order to benefit from the holiday season that year. In the end, the development of the first release of the site was done in less than 3 weeks.

Solution

Kentico enabled the website to be developed in a short period of time even with a good amount of features and functionality included.

The Kids Cancer Project utilises Kentico’s e-commerce functionality as a base and it was customised to meet the client requirements. For example, the checkout process allows customers to choose that their donations be shipped to a specific hospital, to themselves or to another address. The hospitals themselves and their details and addresses can be content-managed in a custom table.

In addition, the shopping process has been customised to recognise whether or not the customer is donating or purchasing a product and tailor their receipts and messages accordingly which is important for tax receipt purposes for example.

The site also connects with two different payment providers. It uses Eway which is an Australian Payment Gateway to provide primary credit card processing and it also allows customers to utilise PayPal.

In addition to the e-commerce facilities, the site also utilises a custom BizForm to enable customers to make donations. This form is also integrated with both Eway and PayPal and allows customers to make one-off payments or set up recurring donations.

Finally, the site also incorporates the Kentico Blog Module, newsletter functionality and event calendar – so it’s a feature packed site!