Service for collecting donations for social projects in Kuwait
Direct Aid is a non-profit organization in Kuwait that raises funds for social projects. For example, drilling a well in areas with a shortage of fresh water, building a university, raising funds for healthcare needs. All donations are accepted online through the website or mobile application.
Field: collecting donations for social projects
Country: Kuwait
Website Direct Aid
The client had a simple donation collection service deployed on CS-Cart. Prior to contacting us, he was accompanied by another ecommerce agency, whose services did not suit the client: problems were solved slowly and client’s messages were not answered for several days. As the business and traffic were growing the load on the server has increased. Sometimes, during a large number of one-time donations, the load reached such a critical point that the site simply crashed. The client started to look for another ecommerce agency to support the project and chose us.
As for 2020, we have been working with Direct Aid for five years now and we are regularly improving their website.
It feels great to be part of a project that makes the world a better place.
It was possible to reduce the load on the server with high traffic thanks to two solutions:
As a result, the server runs smoothly even during large advertising campaigns.
The site began to withstand loads of up to 30,000 simultaneous visitors
and 6,000 donations per minute.
We have improved the mechanism for making donations so that it is more transparent and visible. Now the visual scale shows how much money is needed for the project and how much money has already been collected, as well as how many people have made donations.
This builds trust and motivates users well to participate in campaigns.
The standard European payment methods were not suitable for our client, so we integrated the Kuwaiti payment system K-net into CS-Cart and developed an electronic wallet.
It works like this: each registered user receives an account in the Direct Aid system.
He can replenish it, and then choose it as a payment method and use money from it to make a donation.
To further simplify the donation process, we have added a one-click donation method. On the main page the user selects a campaign, presses the checkout button and, bypassing the cart, gets to a pop-up window to select a payment method.
The client already had a mobile application, but it was not tied to CS-Cart and required some improvements. We have extended the CS-Cart API so that the service can interact with native IOS and Android applications so that people can donate via mobile devices.
The administrative panel has a section with statistical reports. We finalized it to make something similar to Google Analytics, but for the specifics of our client. Now you can view users’ statistics depending on the category of the project they donated to; find out how many registered users and how many guests donated; who returned and who came for the first time. Statistics are presented visually in the form of charts and histograms, which is very helpful for service analysts.
Direct Aid has a corporate system (similar to 1C) where finances are kept. Together with the client’s developer, we integrated it into CS-Cart so that information from the database is loaded into the financial system. This allows automatic accounting reports generation.
If a site visitor does not know what he wants to donate money to or he is not sure how to find what he needs on the site, he can use an intelligent chatbot. The bot asks leading questions: “What do you want to donate money for?”, “Do you want to register or make a donation as a guest?”. In this case, it is not necessary to type the answer, you can just choose from ready-made ones.
The more people learn about the ongoing campaign, the more donations will be collected. We needed a universal tool that would allow us to notify people even offline which allows us to find the Direct Aid website on the Internet and open the desired page without putting much effort. QR codes have become an excellent solution.
The client prints the QR code of a certain fundraising campaign, for example, on a banner in a shopping center, on flyers, on outdoor advertising banners. An interested passer-by scans the code with a smartphone and the campaign page on the website opens immediately.
This decision made it possible to “make friends” online and offline and expand the reach of the target audience.
Once a year, Direct Aid holds large-scale offline charity events. Famous guests are invited to them, who themselves donate money and encourage others to participate. For these events, we have developed an interactive presentation of fundraising: the countdown starts on the screen, the dynamics of fundraising and animated statistics are displayed.
People can see how the required amount is collected, and this encourages them to join and become part of the project.
A project that makes the world a better place.
One of the last events we helped Direct Aid with took place in December 2020. It was a campaign to raise funds for the blind fund. A campaign page was created on the Direct Aid website, but the event itself was held on YouTube in the stream of the famous Arab blogger AboFlah (10 million subscribers). For this event, we have integrated a widget from the Direct Aid website into the YouTube broadcast.
It worked like this: YouTube viewers saw the campaign widget on the stream, followed it to the site, made donations and wrote a message to the general chat after successful payment. We processed statistical data from the CS-Cart side and sent it back to the broadcast so that all the values on the widget were updated in real time. Each viewer saw how the fundraising was going on online and could feel being a part of a big deal.
During the broadcast, the maximum number of stream viewers was about 25,000 users, and there were about 18,000 visitors on the site at peak moments. The site did a great job with this amount of traffic and the number of one-time donations. By the end of December, the broadcast had been viewed more than 8.8 million times, and nearly KWD 66,000 in donations had been raised. And these are great results! We enjoyed working in the social sphere helping people.
The server copes with any load even during a high traffic flow: it can withstand loads of up to 30,000 simultaneous visitors and 6,000 donations per minute.
Allows you to turn the collection of donations into large-scale advertising campaigns, including live broadcasts on YouTube. This helps to collect the necessary amounts for important social projects in the shortest possible time.
Now those who want to help have the opportunity to make donations even easier and faster due to convenient payment methods, a display of the fundraising process and a chat bot.
Donations can be made from a mobile device
anytime, anywhere.
Majed Sultan AL Za’abi
Thanks to Cart-Power we’ve created the best donation service across the Middle East.
Field: collecting donations for social projects Country: Kuwait
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