UniteWithUkraine

The project

UniteWithUkraine is the Ukrainian World Congress's global fundraising initiative. It procures and delivers critical military and medical equipment to Ukraine's defenders, and since February 2022 has raised over $75 million from donors in 70+ countries.

Wartime fundraising has a shape that ordinary charity fundraising does not. The first months run on emotion and one-off gifts. What comes after is the hard part: the news cycle moves on, the need does not, and an organisation that built its product around a single "Donate" button watches its income fall with attention. The product problem is converting a surge into a base.

What we did

DForce builds and supports the fundraising experience.

• The Defender's Marketplace. Instead of an amount field, donors fund a specific item: an FPV drone, a tactical medical kit, an armored ambulance. The same money, framed as a thing that exists. This is the difference between "support Ukraine" and "buy a tourniquet bag", and it changes both conversion and average gift.
• "Fight Like a Ukrainian" recurring subscriptions, funding combat medics on a monthly basis. This is the answer to the attention problem: a donor decides once, in a month when they are moved, and keeps giving in the months when they are not.
• Donor accounts with social login (Google, Microsoft, Facebook) and email-link sign-in, plus self-service management of recurring donations. A recurring programme that makes cancelling hard bleeds trust; one that makes it easy keeps donors longer.
• Multi-region, multi-currency versions - Global, USA, Canada - because tax treatment, payment methods and the legal entity receiving the gift all differ per region.
• Impact, Stories and Learn & Connect sections, carrying the reporting load. A recurring donor stays only if they keep seeing where the money went.
• Payment and account infrastructure integrated with Givecloud at real transaction scale.

Engineering notes

• Recurring is a product, not a checkbox. Subscription state, failed-payment recovery, upgrades and cancellation all live in the donor account, which is why the account layer exists at all.
• Region changes more than currency. Each regional version has its own payment methods, receipting and entity, so the site is built as parallel regional experiences rather than one site with a currency dropdown.
• The marketplace has to stay honest. Items are catalog entries tied to real procurement, so the list has to be editable by the organisation as needs change at the front, without a release.
• Campaign speed. Emergency campaigns are launched in hours, not sprints, so the content and donation surfaces are built to be reconfigured by the team.

Highlights

• $75M+ raised across 70+ countries
• A recurring revenue model built for sustained support, not one-off gifts
• Payment, account and regional infrastructure operating at real scale

Services: Product, Design, Engineering. · unitewithukraine.com