Garden Organic
Eighteen thousand memberships, all of them on paper.
Garden Organic are the national charity for organic growing. They campaign, they research, and they run the Heritage Seed Library. When the site was rebuilt, most of their membership was still being administered by hand.
Moving a membership organisation online
Garden Organic had a new brand, built offline, and decades of accumulated horticultural knowledge. What they did not have was a way for a member to join, renew, donate or order seed without somebody at the charity stepping in.
The site had three jobs at once: explain organic growing to people who had never tried it, give members a reason to stay members, and take money reliably.
Kind reported eighteen thousand paper memberships moved online after launch, with an extra seventeen thousand pounds in donations in a month.
Where the money actually comes from
Memberships, donations and seed orders all run through the site, integrating seamlessly with systems Garden Organic was already using.
Money in, without rekeying
Joining, renewing, donating and ordering from the Heritage Seed Library were wired straight into the site through Opayo, rather than going through somebody at the charity typing up a paper form.
Somewhere to put member benefits
A members’ area gave Garden Organic a place to offer exclusive content, offers and benefits to the people paying for them, which they had never had before.
One membership record
The site talks to the CRM the charity already ran on, so a membership created online is the same record as one created in the office.
Asking at the right moment
Donations are prompted while someone is already ordering or registering, which is when people are most inclined to give rather than when a newsletter reaches them.
Advice for people who have never grown anything
Garden Organic’s advice runs from what to put in a compost bin through to research on glyphosate. The content model had to carry both without making a beginner feel stupid or an expert feel patronised, which mostly meant letting editors choose how deep a given page goes rather than forcing everything through one template.
What I did
I built this at Kind. The brand, the research and the content strategy were other people’s work, and the Opayo and CRM integrations were a colleague’s. The design arrived as a static file, and the content model and the front end were mine from that point on.
Garden Organic’s audience runs from lifelong growers to people who have never planted anything, at every level of confidence with a computer. So accessibility was not a late check: semantic markup, keyboard support and a sensible heading structure went in as the templates were built.
Nobody ever thanks you for a heading structure. They just find what they came for, which is the whole idea.
