Case study · Millennium Mams
Turning a checkout into a contribution system
Millennium Mams’ has been teaching women to understand and manage their own money since 1993. Contributions from members and well-wishers fund that work, and they were being collected through a WooCommerce checkout bolted onto the organisation’s WordPress site. Ascent replaced it with a purpose-built contribution platform: a three-step form on any phone, a payment trail the team can actually read, and a system that settles its own loose ends rather than leaving them for someone to chase.
The challenge A shop, asked to do something else.
The organisation was using a shop to take contributions, and it showed. WooCommerce asks what a shop asks: billing and shipping, a cart, a quantity, free shipping on a donation.
The questions Millennium Mams’ actually needed, about membership, PAN for the receipt, who introduced a new member and what someone can offer beyond money, had been added underneath as custom fields on a checkout page that was never designed to carry them.
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01
A long form on a small screen
Every field, required and optional, sat in one column. Most contributions start on a phone, and a single scroll of twenty-six fields is where people give up.
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02
Records lived in the store
Contribution details were spread across order metadata, awkward to search and awkward to export for a team that needed a simple list of who had given what.
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03
Payments could go quiet
When a donor paid and closed the tab before returning to the site, the browser callback never arrived. The payment succeeded at the bank and sat unrecorded, and finding those meant comparing the gateway’s records against the site by hand.
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04
No visibility on what was sent
Receipts either arrived or they did not. There was no way to see whether an email had bounced, so a donor with a mistyped address simply never heard back.
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05
Questions that did not apply to everyone
A new member and a member of fifteen years were asked the same things, including several that made sense for only one of them.
Our approach Understand, analyse, re-engineer and build, embed.
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01
Understand
We began with the contribution itself rather than the page: who gives, on what device, and what the organisation needs to know about them at the moment they give.
We reviewed the existing checkout field by field, and separated the questions that belong to a payment from those that belong to membership, which the shop had merged into one list.
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02
Analyse
Two findings shaped the build. First, the field set was not too long, it was unsorted: it mixed what everyone must answer with what only some people should see.
Second, the gateway integration was sound but one-directional. It listened for the donor’s browser to come back and had no second route to the truth, which is why payments went quiet.
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03
Re-engineer and build
We built a standalone PHP and MySQL application, sitting alongside the WordPress site rather than inside it, and kept CCAvenue as the gateway so nothing changed for the finance team.
For donors
A three-step contribution flow built for a phone
- Your details, then about you, then confirm and pay, with a progress rail and the amount always visible
- A sticky action bar at the bottom of the screen, so the next step is always under the thumb
- New member or existing member chosen once, after which each sees only the questions that apply to them
- Validation that explains itself as they type, and never loses what they have already entered
- A receipt by email within moments, and a thank-you page that returns them to the main site
For the organisation
An admin portal that answers the real questions
- Every contribution in one searchable list, filtered by status, city or date, with successful payments shown first
- The full submission behind each one, including the membership answers and where the form was filled in from
- One-click export to CSV, matching exactly what the daily report sends
- A daily payments report by email, with the full contribution list attached, to a recipient list the team manages itself
- A log of every email the system has sent, and what became of it: delivered, soft bounced, hard bounced or reported as spam
- A warning on a donor’s record when their receipt hard bounced, so someone can follow up another way
For payments that go quiet
Three independent routes to the truth
- The browser callback, as before
- A server-to-server notification from the gateway, which arrives whether or not the donor returns to the site
- A scheduled reconciliation that asks the gateway directly about anything still pending, settles it, and sends the donor the email they should have had
The money itself is treated as the thing most worth protecting. The amount charged comes from the server, never the browser. A payment reported as successful for the wrong amount is recorded for a human to check, not quietly accepted. A receipt can be issued only once, whichever route confirmed the payment. Every request to and response from the gateway is stored, which is what you need on the day a donor says the money left their account.
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04
Embed
We built in short cycles with the organisation’s team, working from screenshots and live feedback: the wording of the class commitment, which questions belong to new members, and how the reference number should read so it can be traced at a glance.
The platform continues to evolve with them.
The impact What changed for the organisation.
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Three short steps
A contribution takes three short steps, not one long scroll, on the device most donors actually use.
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Only your own questions
New members and existing members see different halves of the form, decided by a single tap.
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No payment goes missing
Three independent routes confirm what happened, and anything unresolved is visible rather than invisible.
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Delivery you can see
The team can see what was sent and whether it arrived, instead of assuming.
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Records that belong to the organisation
One list, one export, one daily report, with no need to understand an e-commerce data model to answer a simple question.
More case studies Other engagements.
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