La Ruche
- Web
- Finance
Context
La Ruche is a funding solution that allows entrepreneurs, organizations, and citizens of Quebec to finance a project through crowdfunding.
La Ruche stands out from other platforms by offering personalized support, strong regional presence, and exclusive additional funding programs that facilitate the achievement of financial objectives and project success.
Mandate & Goals
In 2023, La Ruche partnered with Mirego to perform a comprehensive audit of their digital ecosystem and enhance their platform's user experience.
The project focused on achieving these key objectives:
- Enhance website navigation and search capabilities;
- Strengthen La Ruche's service offering visibility and clarity;
- Simplify the campaign donation journey;
- Expand and improve project holders’ toolset and functionality.
These strategic initiatives were designed to drive growth in project submissions, boost contributor engagement per campaign, and improve overall campaign success rates.
Approach
To establish a strong foundation for the project, our team conducted a comprehensive discovery phase encompassing over a dozen strategic activities. These included stakeholder workshops, website behavioral analysis, user interviews, competitive market research, and intention surveys.
The insights gathered during this phase led to a clear conclusion: the key to success lay in streamlining both the platform and user experience, minimizing friction points for project creators and contributors alike.
Technology
Artificial intelligence empowering project holders
Through integrated generative AI technology, project holders can now enhance their project descriptions with minimal input, while selecting their preferred tone of voice. This feature is integrated directly within La Ruche's project creation platform.
The platform's AI capabilities are powered by GPT-3.5 Turbo, implemented via a dedicated API endpoint. The system leverages all JSON-formatted form data submitted by project holders to provide comprehensive context to the language model. Our approach features carefully crafted prompt engineering with defined rules and a feedback system to guide the model's outputs.
The user interface features a simplified button-based interaction system, while maintaining the underlying query structure. This balanced approach, together with carefully defined parameters, delivers relevant and creative outputs for platform users within established technical guidelines.
Custom dashboard for project holders
Growing the number of projects is key to La Ruche's expansion. When project holders take their first steps into creating a project, they are guided through a seamless, turnkey process.
Redesigned campaign pages
The vast majority of traffic to La Ruche lands directly on campaign pages shared through social media. This experience happens predominantly on mobile devices. Therefore, it's essential to inform potential contributors about La Ruche's unique approach and encourage them to enter the payment process within seconds.
For this reason, we completely redesigned the structure and experience of this crucial landing page to improve conversion rates, build user trust, leverage network effects and stakeholder reputation, as well as highlight major funding partners.
Optimized contribution flow
When the project page succeeds in motivating contributors to support a project, the next critical step is providing a quick and trustworthy experience, while clearly communicating how this transaction differs from standard e-commerce purchases.
We optimized the contribution process by simplifying the user journey, reducing steps, implementing a progress bar, and introducing guest checkout functionality.
Campaign alerts and re-engagement
Through new campaign alert features, past contributors receive timely notifications about relevant project updates that align with their interests.
Enhanced search and content hierarchy
By enhancing La Ruche's search capabilities and properly structuring content, we make it easier for contributors to find and support meaningful projects, while also discovering different funding options and potential investments.
“We've enhanced our support for individuals looking to kick off a campaign on La Ruche, making it significantly easier for users to make contributions, and in turn, dramatically improving the overall user experience.”
Results
Within six months of launching its new platform, La Ruche achieved a significant milestone in advancing its mission. The results demonstrate exceptional growth across all areas, while user feedback confirms that the new tools successfully address project holders requirements.
+77%
increase in total funding
The new platform drove a 77% growth in overall funding for supported projects.
+28%
in number of contributors
The contributor base experienced a 28% growth, significantly expanding the community.
+9%
in successful campaigns
The number of successful campaigns increased by 9% during this period.
+7%
higher user satisfaction
User satisfaction scores rose by 7 points, reflecting improved platform performance.
