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How UNICEF Built A Donation Platform Across 135 Currencies and 7 Languages

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Mike
Conlow
Head of Technology Consulting
Blue State Digital
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Jeff
Tomlinson
Architect
Four Kitchens
Type
Talk
Experience level
Intermediate
Duration
45 minutes
Room
spectrum A
Starts at
Ends at
Industry track
Summary

In our session, we’ll discuss how UNICEF partnered with Blue State Digital, Four Kitchens, and Motherlode Media to build a custom global payments platform.  We’ll focus on how we addressed UNICEF’s need to set up global campaigns, localized to donors in different countries in a matter of minutes, while simultaneously supporting local UNICEF offices in their own fundraising needs.  Additionally, we’ll discuss how the organization approached the decision of whether to build a new product or leverage off-the-shelf tools to accomplish their goals.

Description

When disaster strikes, UNICEF has to be able to respond in real time. During an international emergency (e.g., a tsunami, or a hurricane, or man-made humanitarian crisis), those impacted depend on UNICEF’s ability to instantly respond, which includes raising money to support their work.  Their mission of raising money to support children can’t rely on ad hoc coordination across international offices or figuring out new payment processor accounts.

In our session, we’ll discuss how UNICEF partnered with Blue State Digital, Four Kitchens, and Motherlode Media to build a custom global payments platform.  We’ll focus on how we addressed UNICEF’s need to set up global campaigns, localized to donors in different countries in a matter of minutes, while simultaneously supporting local UNICEF offices in their own fundraising needs.  Additionally, we’ll discuss how the organization approached the decision of whether to build a new product or leverage off-the-shelf tools to accomplish their goals.

From there, we’ll discuss how working in Drupal allowed the team to address the complex technical challenges that we faced in developing this donation platform. In particular:

  1. How we localize the payment form to 135+ currencies

  2. Modifying the payment form fields to meet individual countries’ giving requirements

  3. Allowing individual country offices to “fork” a page and take control of the content

  4. The logic that assumes the donor’s preferred language

  5. How we integrated Google Wallet and Apple Pay

Finally, we’ll detail some of our architectural decisions, such as selecting Stripe as our payment processor, and our decision to forego storing PII in our Drupal database. We also made sure to take market variation and regulation into account, including GDPR compliant consent and data management processes ahead of the new data protection changes in Europe.

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