La Ruche

Web

Finance

2024

Launch year

Web

Technologies used

Driving local crowdfunding growth

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.

Visual representation of La Ruche's digital ecosystem

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 initiators

With generative AI, project initiators can now refine their project description from just a few inputs, and even select the tone of the generated text. A built-in translation feature also lets them translate an entire campaign, including its offers, in just a few clicks. The result is a ready-to-edit draft they can adjust as they see fit, all without ever leaving La Ruche's project creation platform.

The platform's AI capabilities are powered by GPT-5.4 Turbo, implemented via a dedicated API endpoint. The system leverages all JSON-formatted form data submitted by project initiators 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.

Digital experience

A campaign creation experience built for autonomy

In 2025, the end of a provincial subsidy pushed La Ruche to rethink its regional support model. Rather than scaling back the support offered to project initiators, the organization chose to invest in its digital platform to guide them at every step, right within the campaign creation experience.

Working closely with La Ruche, our team reimagined the creation journey to start with a targeted questionnaire that qualifies the project and gets project initiators engaged early on. From there, the process unfolds in clear, structured steps with visible progress tracking and automatic saving, so nothing gets lost along the way.

Built-in contextual guidance

As project initiators work through the creation process, relevant tips appear based on the fields they're filling out. The platform also analyzes the data entered to provide real-time recommendations, such as whether the financial goal is realistic or what the ideal campaign duration should be. These nudges mirror the kind of support an agent would offer in person, without ever getting in the way of progress.

Easier access to additional funding

La Ruche stands out with its exclusive additional funding programs, which give project initiators a matching amount for every dollar raised from the public. A module built directly into the creation journey now lets them check their campaign's eligibility through a short prequalification questionnaire and track its status in real time.

Offer and inventory management

Exclusive offers for contributors are what drive a crowdfunding campaign. The offer setup now lets project initiators define options and variants (like size or colour) and assign specific quantities to each combination, giving them complete control over their inventory.

A dashboard to manage every step of your campaign

While the campaign is live, the dashboard gives project initiators access to real-time performance metrics, including campaign goal tracking, top-performing offers and additional funding status. They also get a detailed transaction summary and can export all their data into a single consolidated file.

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.

Interface elements of the simplified donation process

Campaign alerts and re-engagement

Through new campaign alert features, past contributors receive timely notifications about relevant project updates that align with their interests.

“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.”

Stéphanie Morel

Marketing and Communications Director at La Ruche

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.

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