The Lebanese cedar, or the Arze, is the country’s biggest symbol of pride and patriotism. It’s described in scriptures as the "the glory of Lebanon" and cited in poetry as “the most famous natural monuments in the world.” The century-old tree is printed on the national flag, documents, car plates, façades, street art, team jerseys, tattoos, and literally everything. But whilst cedar illustrations can be found everywhere, actual cedar forests are vanishing by the minute and climate change is to blame for that. In fact, the remnant cedars cover only 3 percent of the country, or 17 square kilometers, making the tree harder to find in nature than on walls, wallets, Lira bills and so forth.

With this in mind, we decided to create an innovative payment solution: ArzePay. A commerce experience that turns every tree illustration into a form of fighting extinction. By using machine learning technology, the website uses the built-camera from any device (phones, tablets, etc) to scan any Arze illustration and transform it into a donation gateway.

So, people can donate and help save the Lebanese cedar with just their device. Making the platform essentially like ApplePay, but for the cedars, and transforming every Arze illustration into a reminder to donate and help save the actual trees.

Statistics show that adding gamification to a fundraising campaign can boost engagement by 100% to 150%. In addition, 89% of people say they’re more likely to donate to charity if the payment method is unique*. So, when Greenpeace wanted to launch their latest donation campaign in Lebanon, we decided to recreate their online donation gateway, gamifying the experience, and making it memorable to anyone participating. Since 47 percent of donors don’t remember the charity they donated to, we knew that such strategy could increase the likeliness of repeat donations, especially if people saw another cedar.

Now, the Lebanese economy is declining and 75% of the total population is living abroad. So, it was crucial for the campaign to work for all Lebanese people worldwide. And since all citizens have a passport, ID card, money bills, we knew that our target audience was covered.

*Source: Charity Checkout

Creating a website that transformed cedar illustrations into donation gateways involved hours and hours of machine learning and teaching the system to read the most varied of cedar illustrations since it was essential for the platform to scan every cedar regardless of size, texture or orientation.

To achieve the desired results, we tirelessly fed thousands and thousands of images into the system and enabled the machine to learn new designs whenever it couldn’t scan an illustration.

So, when arzepay.com was launched in January, 2023, the platform could automatically detect any cedar illustration, allowing people to scan icons and donate easily. And just like ApplePay, people could register their data on the first use and donate automatically on the following scans, making the whole process seamless for repeat donors.

In only 2 weeks since the platform launch, 10,594 cedar illustrations were scanned in over 18 countries, resulting in a massive in-flux of donations for Greenpeace. The NGO saw a 113% donation increase when compared to the previous fundraising campaign and in only a short amount of time, it became the most successful donation campaign ever in the Middle East.

The campaign’s 79% conversion rate was another fantastic measure of success since it proved that only 21% of people who visited the website actually didn’t go through with their donations.