The Good Registry home page

The challenge: Targeting the socially-conscious

But Christine Langdon wanted every gift to matter, which is why she founded social enterprise The Good Registry. In 2017 she asked us* to develop a platform that simplifies gift-giving, reduces wasteful purchases and helps good causes. She wanted to make it easy for people to ask gift-givers to donate to a charity of their choice. The Good Registry targets three audiences:

  1. The waste-conscious who no longer want gifts they’ll never use. 
  2. People who prefer money that would’ve been spent on gifts for them, instead go to a good cause.
  3. Charities that rely heavily on public donations for their annual revenue stream. 

We quickly set our minds to creating a ‘phase 1’ website.

Springload were passionate about their work and it was obvious they were committed to making The Good Registry a success.

Christine Langdon

Co-founder, CE and Chief of Good, The Good Registry

Our approach: Working to a tight timeframe

We had a 10 week window in which to build an MVP the client wanted ready for Christmas. Working furiously and collaboratively we were able to meet this deadline employing these methods:

  • content strategy
  • web content creation guidance and copy-editing
  • barebones UX wireframes
  • a physical site map to show progress at daily standups
  • a user interface that reflected the brand and the client’s vision for a warm and welcoming platform.

There’s still a lot we’d love to build on the ‘phase one’ site that we launched with, to increase our impact. We’d love to work with Springload to achieve that.

Christine Langdon

Co-founder, CE and Chief of Good, The Good Registry

Building the platform

The application was built with Ruby on Rails, a pragmatic framework that enabled us to develop rapidly and deliver a robust product. We took a minimalist approach to the front-end build using a lightweight and highly customisable CSS framework and server-side rendered HTML. A light sprinkling of vanilla JS makes it come alive. 

For the payment gateway we chose Stripe, which has a simple client onboarding process and developer friendly API’s.

The results: Delivering a simple and sustainable way to give

Phase 1** of The Good Registry allowed people to easily sign up and create an event registry. They’re then offered a choice of charities from an approved list curated and verified by The Good Registry. The platform then creates a public registry page which is shareable and allows people to leave ‘gifts’. 

From the initial whiteboard sessions, to building the software, and adding the final UI touches, together we’ve built a platform for sustainable giving. We’re proud to have had a hand in amplifying The Good Registry’s ability to do social good. 

*This project was undertaken by Touchtech who merged with Springload in March 2018.

**Since launching, The Good Registry have moved their online store to Shopify to enable additional functionality. This includes launching Good Gift Cards, and a CMS to increase user engagement and enable regular content updates, such as a blog. Some of the design and content elements have changed.

$10k+

donated in first five months of operating

60

registries created for Christmas 2017

50+

charities to donate to