Kathryn Sadler

Make-A-Wish–Raising children's charity awareness with Voice

Overview
Make-A-Wish Australia is an affiliate of Make-A-Wish (the world's largest wish-granting charity) and one of Australia's most reputable children's charities. The charity relies entirely on the generosity of volunteers, partners and supporters to realise life-changing wishes for children with critical illnesses.
As part of their Christmas 2021 marketing campaign, they were keen to trial using a voice experience to engage supporters by bringing them closer to the Wish Stories that they make happen.

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RESEARCH & DISCOVERY

Background
The goal of the voice app was to share a handful of Wish Stories from the perspective of the children's families. The hope was that users would interact with and navigate through the stories, and then be routed to a donation path. Additionally, users could find out more information about the organisation and the work they do.

Initial challenges

IDEATION
I worked with key client stakeholders to clarify the non-story components of the app such as donation information and contact information, drafted sample dialogues and ran several rounds of content review.

The Wish Stories were selected by the Make-A-Wish team as they had recorded a selection of interviews with Wish families. I reviewed these story audios carefully to ensure that the quality would be good enough for playback on a smart speaker device.

I wrote short intros for each story and included Alexa and Google Assistant-specific instructions so that the user knew how to skip ahead or back to a story.

DESIGN & DEVELOPMENT
Once the core content and intents had been finalised, I completed the first draft of the detailed conversation design, with relevant error handling at key points of the conversation.

I referenced the Make-A-Wish Australia brand playbook and tone of voice guidelines for direction with the bot prompts. The tone needed to be warm, friendly & human, with a “focus on the joy and lasting impact of a wish”. I also had to ensure I was careful with any references to donations in the dialogue, due again to platform policies.

I walked the key client stakeholders through the design, clarifying any areas of uncertainty and noting their feedback for updates.

With the design approved, the TalkVia tech team started the build phase and I continued to work with the client to finalise the remaining content for the app. This included screen visuals–images of the Wish Children would appear on the device accompanying their story–and email content for Contact Detail and Donation Information emails.

We ran extensive internal QA followed by user acceptance testing with a panel of seven client stakeholders, before submitting to the Google and Alexa platforms for certification.

CONCLUSION

The voice experience was launched on both the Google and Alexa platforms ahead of Make-A-Wish Australia's Christmas campaign.

The client stakeholders were delighted with their new conversational experience and how smoothly the project had run.

I hope to be able to work with Make-A-Wish Australia in a future phase to add VO audios to replace the TTS. I also hope that with upcoming improvements to TalkVia's analytics platform, I’ll be able to evaluate user interactions to identify further improvements, and potentially add any new content that is being requested by users and currently not handled.