When I joined GivenGain as Head of Design, the company was about to enter a new phase of growth. The brand, website and fundraising platform needed to become clearer, more cohesive and better equipped to support a growing global audience of charities, fundraisers and donors.
Project Facts
My Role: Head of Design
Scope: Brand identity, website, UX research, product UI, design system, user dashboards, donation journey
Teams: Product, Engineering, Marketing, Executive Leadership and external partners where relevant
Period: 12 months (2023-2024)
GivenGain had a strong mission and an established fundraising platform, but its brand and digital experience had evolved unevenly over time. The website, product UI and marketing materials did not always feel like parts of the same company. As the platform intended to expand internationally, that lack of consistency became harder to manage.
The challenge was not simply to modernise the visuals. It was to create a clearer, more trusted and more scalable experience across the places where users discovered, evaluated and used GivenGain.
My challenge was taking a product and brand that had 5 distinct user audiences, all crucial to our success as a fundraising platform and experience.
The usual suspects.
My Role And Leadership Scope
I led the visual and experience direction across the rebrand, website redesign and product interface evolution. My role combined brand and product strategy, UX/UI design, creative direction and cross-functional collaboration with product, engineering, marketing and leadership.
I was responsible for defining the new identity, translating it into a usable digital design language, shaping key website and product journeys, and creating the foundations for consistent future execution.
The Challenge
Create a modern, distinctive global identity without losing trust or warmth and get the buy-in of the GivenGain board including the founder & CEO.
Make the website easier to understand for charities, fundraisers and donors with different needs.
Bring the platform UI closer to the new brand, without reducing usability.
Establish a visual and design system that could support a rapidly growing organisation.
Taking an identity created in 2001 (remember the dotcom bubble?) and recreating it for the modern digital experience.
The Strategic Decision
Early in 2023, the main strategic decision taken was to make the fundraiser our most important user. This was a big change from our recent focus on attracting events and or charities. Now we were going to focus on the individual. So how do we attract new fundraisers and enable them to best tell their stories? The new brand and product identity needed to promote this at all times.
New Product Pillars
Human, not corporate - fundraising is personal, emotional and community-driven.
Clear at moments of commitment - users need confidence when choosing a charity, creating a fundraiser or donating.
Optimistic without becoming childish - the brand should feel energetic and hopeful, but credible enough for global nonprofits and major events.
Built for participation - the platform should make it easier for people to take action for causes they care about.
Flexible enough to scale - the system must work across global campaigns, charities, events, fundraising pages and product tools.
I looked at all the relevant GivenGain User Journeys - shown here are excerpts from my explorations of the Charity User Dashboard, the Fundraiser Lifecycle and how to manage the Record of Donations in the Fundraiser Dashboard.
Specifically for our initial launch, I explored which journeys and experiences were most crucial to our product. I connected with fundraisers and charities and our support teams to build a picture of what was required for phase 1.
I created the framework for our design system which was then moved into Storybook for the engineering team.
The work
Selected processes, key workflows, the visual system and final execution.
New product UX & UI
The rebrand could not end at the marketing site. Users experience GivenGain through the product: creating fundraising pages, managing campaigns, signing up charities and making donations. I translated the new identity into a practical UX and UI language that made the product feel more coherent while protecting clarity in high-stakes journeys like the Donation and Payment flow.
New visual identity
The identity needed to work equally well for a major global charity, an individual first-time fundraiser and a donor making a quick decision on mobile. I developed a flexible visual system that combined confident colour, clear typography and human-centred imagery—giving GivenGain a more distinctive presence without sacrificing clarity.
New design system
The goal was not to create a one-off launch identity. GivenGain needed a practical system that could work across product releases, charity communications, fundraising campaigns, events, partnerships and internal teams. I developed reusable components and visual rules that made the work more consistent while giving teams enough flexibility to adapt to different needs.
New website
The website had to explain one platform to several very different audiences: charities looking for a fundraising partner, people wanting to support a cause, individuals launching a fundraiser and event organisers building campaigns. The redesign simplified that story, created clearer pathways into the product and gave GivenGain a more confident public presence.
The Outcome
This was one of the biggest, scariest and most rewarding projects of my entire career. It felt like it touched on everything I had learnt over the past 15 years and it was mammoth collaborative effort from the entire GivenGain team, working under extreme pressure and time constraints.
There were of course mistakes and huge amounts of learnings, but ultimately, the work we did in 2023/2024 has enabled us to sign a new decade partnership with the biggest fundraising event on the planet, the Boston Marathon as well as new multi-year deals with CEM (Chicago Marathon and The Chicago Distance Series), global events registration platform, Let’s Do This as well as numerous other partnerships that have grown the business 10x whilst scaling the product in a stable, consistent manner, something that wasn’t possible pre-2023.
I am very proud of GivenGain.com.