Open Doors

Open Doors are a worldwide organisation that provides support, resources, and training to persecuted Christians. A lot of their work goes unseen on the ground, and Open Doors rely on financial and spiritual support from individuals and partners to enable them to help those in need.

Open Doors wanted to run a campaign called Arise Africa to gain signatures for a petition that they will present to the UN. The petition calls on the Global community to offer protection, justice, and restoration to persecuted Christians in Africa. They have commissioned an artist to create a tree sculpture and joined forces with us as their digital partner to build supporting online content.

70k+
People engaged so far: 6
Continents: 28
Languages

People and Impact

The petition is being prepared to be presented at the United Nations, as the campaign seeks global attention and action, to aid the community of persecuted Christians in sub-Saharan Africa.

We continue to support the ongoing work and remain available to provide updates and changes as required by the Open Doors team.

Ambitious and creative thinking

Our team jumped at the chance to explore how we can create a digital experience connected to a physical piece of art, connecting their international teams to enable a Global Campaign.

They wanted to build an online experience for supporters to interact with the tree and help people contribute beyond their financial giving, providing a platform for users to add prayers and hopes online. These would appear as leaves growing on the tree and support the campaign as it grew, bringing together tangible aspects to those contributing from afar and demonstrate the scale of the campaign.

The prayer leaf aspect was a creative solution for getting users to come back to the site after their first interaction, previous campaigns struggled to get return visitors and this idea was backed up with bold artwork. The vision was to enable repeat engagement, from an international audience, building truly global traction for an ongoing campaign.

UX and UI Design

Together with the Open Doors team, DP (our Head of UX) worked on how the user journey needed to flow, focusing on whom they saw as their target audience and working out what their desired outcomes are. In this case, this meant adding their name to the petition, and adding prayers to the digital tree. Together we were able to focus the aims of the digital campaign and create a global movement.

We wanted to bring life to the concept while also keeping the call to action clear and easy. A simple layout solution meant that the tree illustration could take centre stage, with the stripped back petition element standing boldly in the centre.

The tree was based on the African Camphor tree, a well-known silhouette with a large trunk and dense canopy. Our designer Polly loved bringing the tree to life, adding layers and texture to the design with deep colours and intricate leaves.

Build

The website gives heart to the cause, creating a central place for visitors to engage with how Christians are persecuted across Africa. We used transitions to build an interactive experience, enabling users to become part of the journey.

Our Development team divided the website into two key parts, the main journey exploring the tree and other sub-pages. Users are first taken above the canopy of the tree, before slowly progressing into the leaves, where they can sign the petition and add their voice to the campaign (even seeing their own leaf added to the tree once they add their prayers). The interactive nature of the project was key, and so the users are able to scroll through a selection of leaves from across the world, seeing the voices of those they have joined with in support of this campaign. Users can also explore the subpages to find out more about the campaign and to see stories of Open Door’s work from across Africa.

We wanted to empower the team at Open Doors to add and edit content and to make the site as versatile as possible. To this end, we enabled admin users to add up to 28 Translations of the website and gave them the ability to add and update their content, allowing the site to stay relevant as the campaign continues.

The team also created an embeddable widget that can be used by Open Door’s international development bases own websites. This allows each base to promote the campaign from within its own context, helping the campaign reach out to different nations in specific ways. The power of this is that users can all get the same experience, and the campaign has multiple different ways of reaching a global audience.