I started with what HIA already had: previous research, outcomes, open questions, and everything they’d been debating internally.

That defined the shape of the problem. Two things had to hold before a racer would fundraise — trust that the money would be well spent, and connection to the cause they’d chosen. It also gave me a working model of the audience, which I split into four groups by what actually gets them to a cause: evidence-led, story-led, persuadable, and disengaged.

The persuadable group became the target: they had no obvious personal reason to fundraise and so would be looking into the causes to understand which they connected with most.

Rather than invent the connection levers from theory, I scraped and analysed the custom messages fundraisers had written on their own pages. What reasons did people actually give, unprompted, when nobody was asking?

Seven levers came out of it: personal driver, inspiration and legacy, problem empathy, impact and effectiveness, athleticism, local-to-global, and privilege.

This came with a catch. Only around 10% of fundraisers write anything custom at all, so it skewed toward the most expressive and most engaged — precisely the people who arrive with a reason already. Which meant these levers were hypotheses drawn from the wrong population, and needed testing against real racers rather than assumed.

I mapped out every assumption underneath the levers and the trust question, and grouped them into three learning goals: how trust is built, how racers connect with the causes, and how and when to present cause information.

That gave the research a spine. Every question in the guide, and every element of the stimulus, mapped back to something specific we were trying to find out.

Five sessions with racers signed up to HYROX Melbourne.

Why interviews, and why with something to react to: asking hypothetical questions about charity is close to useless. People consistently believe themselves more altruistic than they are, and will happily tell you a message moved them when it didn’t. So every session was built around reactions to real material rather than opinions about ideas.

Each ran in three parts:

Recall — what racers remembered of their own sign-up, unprompted. This was how I established what had actually got through before showing them anything, and it’s where the central finding first surfaced.

The existing journey — walking the live pages together, to see what registers, what gets misread, and what gets skipped entirely.

The prototype — an interactive version of the cause-selection experience I built with the levers designed in and every content block toggleable, so individual levers could be swapped live and tested one at a time.

Trust, confidence and passion were scored 1–10 at three points: cold, after the live pages, and after the prototype.

I pulled the findings into a strategy narrative — four learnings, each with a design principle HIA could apply to any communication with a fundraiser, not just the page I’d been briefed on.

Racers choose a cause in minutes and don’t hunt for more. Most had never seen the content that would have informed the choice.

→ Give racers the information that matters at the moment it matters. At cause selection, that’s the problem and the impact.

Racers arrive with something to connect to. Being concrete about the problem, and offering stories they can see themselves in, is what turns that into something they can say out loud.

→ Lead with the problem, and give racers a way to see themselves in it.

Specific numbers make the problem land. Personal numbers — what your target delivers — make the fundraising feel worthwhile. General claims do neither.

→ Put it in numbers — specific for the problem, personal for the impact.

No racer could name the organisation they were raising for. Named charities, cited sources and evaluator links reassure even when nobody clicks them — and have to hold up for the few who do.

→ Show your working.