Building Love Notes

At the British Heart Foundation we have an annual fundraising campaign called Love Notes. People visit our shops, pay £1, and write a message on a red paper heart that is then put in the shop window. This year we want to build a digital version. It would need a means of collecting the message, taking payment, having the message approved, and then making the message publicly available and shareable. 

My first thoughts about how to do included using a messenger bot, but the payment would be an issue. We could have also built a separate microsite but that might prove too expensive for a speculative venture like this. So, for cost effectiveness,  speed of build and ease of management, I decided to look at using Magento, the platform our Online is built on. Using our Online Shop would mean we already have the platform, infrastructure, payment gateway, etc. working for us to use for Love Notes. 

I did a quick user journey map of how it could work. 

Building Love Notes

Starting on the home page, which would display some of the recent Love Notes and two options; ‘See more Love Notes’, which goes to a category page displaying all the current Love Notes messages, and ‘Create a Love Note’, which goes to a page with a form to take the details of the Love Notes including who it’s too, the message, and who it’s from. Completing this form takes the user to the payment gateway to take payment and within Magento creates a product with the message as the product name. This product would be held in an On Hold state until it has been checked and approved, and will then be displayed on the Online Shop and an email sent to the customer with a link back to the product page. The product page displaying the Love Note would have options to share on various social networks. 

The next step is to write the requirements, get some costs, and start designing the pages.