Patchwork Case Study

About Patchwork

Patchwork is a crowd-funding service that allows customers to ask their friends or family to contribute towards a project, whether it is an event, gift or social enterprise. Patchwork has uniquely positioned itself as a funding service that focuses on the collaboration between people instead of the reliance on money. They allow users to ask for skills, time, money or to gift unwanted items; whatever they need to achieve their project’s goal.

The Problem

We started working with Patchwork when they were looking to revamp their website and introduce a new user interface for their “patchwork” designer. Their current website wasn’t meeting their needs and they required more flexibility to expand their site’s abilities.

Additionally, Patchwork wanted to expand its reach and connect with new customers. Despite having strong traffic through the site they were finding issues with converting that traffic to sign-ups. The team at Patchwork asked us to review their SEO to help them to increase their conversion and boost their search rankings.

Our Solution

Working with Patchwork as part of a multi-agency team with a focus on the management system (back-end) of the site. Our team worked with the other agencies and Patchwork to establish what was needed to achieve and the key elements that the new site needed to incorporate. The main element that Patchwork wanted to add to the new site was a redesigned “patchwork” builder, which would allow users to design their funding pages as a collection of images that can be each “funded” separately. We developed a bespoke management system that gave Patchwork the flexibility to develop both its product and website without constraints.  

The end system resulted in a Ruby on Rails backend system that incorporated an API that the front-end React patchwork builder could communicate with to make the whole process of the patchwork creation seamless from start to finish. Patchwork also had the added technical problems of what payment gateway to use for their chained payments. They had the option of taking all payments themselves and paying the end contributor the amount less the Patchwork fee, but this would have created an accounting nightmare. Instead, we opted to use the chained payments system supplied by PayPal. This allowed a single payment to be made by the contributor, the Patchwork fee is then sent to the Patchwork PayPal account and the remaining payment is then sent directly to the Patchwork creator. Thankfully a couple of years later, Stripe (perhaps our favourite payment gateway) allowed non-US companies to use their chained payment system as well, which allowed us to offer two platforms for users to be able to take payments with. 

Patchwork approached us to assist in expanding its SEO reach. We reviewed their current website content and strategy, where they were ranking and what they were targeting. We took the key findings and highlighted the key elements that would need to be updated and where we would target to ensure that they achieved their business goals. Our initial review  highlighted some problems that needed to be resolved:

• The content on the site hadn’t been optimised
• There was a lack of call to actions on the site
• Patchwork had no defined keyword strategy 

We worked with Patchwork to set out an SEO strategy that would help them to improve their ranking, traffic and generate sign-ups. Our main goals for the strategy was to increase the organic traffic and number of new users visiting the site, while also increasing the conversion rate for users creating and publishing their “patchworks”.

What We Did

• Delivered a redesigned website that encompassed Patchwork’s key requirements but also provided a future-proofed solution to build on.

• Improved user experience for Patchwork’s customers integrating new technologies.

• Using the review we conducted, we established a new SEO strategy and used this to optimise onsite content and create focused pages for relevant keywords. 

• We reviewed the customer’s journey through the site to improve conversions, by revising and optimising entry pages for the site to improve conversions.

The Results

Patchwork was delighted with their new website, which showcased their unique vision of crowd-funding to a new audience. Originally, we worked on creating a new bespoke back-end of the website as part of a multi-agency build but as time progressed we assumed the development duties for the whole site. We now offer Patchwork ongoing support and development of their core product and website. 

In the first 6 months of the SEO campaign, Patchwork has seen improvements in its organic results. The company has seen a 47% increase in new users throughout the campaign and generated a 25% increase in organic traffic. This resulted in an increased conversion rate for the site of 14% in 6 months.