The challenge
Making Casserole Club more relevant to potential volunteer cooks with clearer messaging, case studies and improved on-boarding.
Casserole Club helps volunteers share extra portions of home-cooked food with people in their area who aren’t always able to cook for themselves. They share once a week, once a month, or whenever works best for them.
Redefining the brand
From reading our volunteer cooks' bios and talking with them directly, we found many were very active people who wanted to do more in their local community but although people thought it was a good idea we needed to be clearer about how people can get involved and what it meant to be part of Casserole Club.
With this in mind we defined some brand principles to help us create a clearer, community focussed service and I began work creating a responsive, modular style guide lead by our new principles. This made it quicker to update the existing non-responsive site and helped the team to picture how the new features might look during the planning process.
Introducing a more vibrant colour pallet, photography and illustrations to build a sense of being a part of a greater community. Choosing the playful display typeface 'Ginger' and imperfect circle crops for the photography helped the service feel more relaxed and informal.
Helping volunteers identify with the community
Many visitors to the site already know about the project from external sources and simply want to get started. For those that didn't we offered the option to find out more, helping potential volunteer cooks and diners decide whether Casserole Club was right for them. We featured testimonials from people taking part in the project in various situations and emphasised the very personal, secure service we were offering.
We also linked up existing user journeys, when one task is completed we line up the next or promote getting involved in our community via social media.
Letting people achieve their goal first time
People come to our site to find someone to share food with but to provide a secure service we have to ask the volunteers for personal information they may not be willing to disclose or have on them in that moment. We also have to ask the user to wait for up to two weeks whilst their information is processed before they can find someone to share food with. The data showed many people making it through the sign up process dropping off at the final security step and this felt like we were wasting people's time.
During this iteration we made it clear what information we require and the sign up process up front. As this wouldn't solve the problem with drop-offs during the 2 week wait so we made it possible to create a list of people they would like to cook for using non identifiable information like interests and favourite foods. This meant volunteers felt they had achieved their goal of finding someone to cook for and simple had to wait to find out when they could share their first meal.
