How to donate in Norwegian

Our friends at anti-human trafficking organisation Hope For Justice (HFJ) have just opened a new office in Norway. They needed a Norwegian language donations page in time for their launch event and asked us to help them build it.

We were already using the brilliant Stripe Checkout for our US donation experience because it focusses so relentlessly on good user experience and mobile accessibility. Sadly checkout isn’t currently available in the Norwegian language - so we needed to craft a similarly slick experience using Stripe.js to power the payments processing.

Aside from language localisation, we had a number of other goals for the user experience:

• Unlike the UK, Norway doesn’t have quite the same culture of peer-to-peer fundraising sites like JustGiving - and the majority of regular donors set up their giving through paper forms. So to begin with we were only targeting one-time donations.

• Norwegians can claim tax relief on their donation by submitting a Tax ID during the donation process. Naturally we wanted to store this as meta-data alongside the payment record.

• Offering preset donation amounts is a common pattern in the donation experience. We were keen to see how well this worked for Hope for Justice.

The whole project was wrapped up into a custom plugin that can be managed through the Wordpress admin area (including donation reporting). Norwegian visitors are identified automatically using their IP address and shown the new form automatically.

Of course, making things look and feel easy to do is rarely an easy process as Andrew, who worked on this project, explains:

‘There were some really tricky UI challenges like working out how to format credit card details and transition between the different payment steps.  But it was important to get them right. It’s little details like this that inform the overall perception and user experience - never more so if you’re trying to help people part with their hard-earned cash’

The whole thing works responsively too, which meant donations could be made on mobile phones at the launch event.

And the result? Well - we’re pretty happy with it - and it’s certainly helped Hope for Justice in raising funds for such an important cause.