The Martat mobile app makes everyday life easier

Digitalization brought the need for an app

The Martha Association, founded in 1899, has over 120 years of experience in content production. Recipes and tips for a better everyday life have been part of the Marthas’ activities from the very beginning. Even today, the Martha Association is known for its excellent advice and tips, and the content produced by Martha continues to generate interest. The content themes have remained the same throughout the years: berry and mushroom picking, preservation, sewing repairs, and gardening are all still as relevant and interesting topics.

Today the Marthas’ website receives nearly 16 million pageviews per year. People of all ages and from all around Finland visit Martat.fi in search of answers to everyday questions. Despite the high traffic on the website, a challenge has emerged: the conversion rate of visitors is low; they come to the site but often leave without taking desired actions.

In early 2021, the Martha Association initiated extensive development projects with the aim of improving the customer experience and offering a wider and more diverse range of content for all those interested in the Marthas’ activities.

The Martha Association is Finland’s most trusted advisory organization, and the organization contemplated how to best provide assistance and answers to everyday questions when they are needed most, given the abundance of favorite content topics. Knitting woolen socks, growing tomatoes and chili, cleaning the oven, removing jar stains, and grandma’s cleaning tips are crowd favorites, but how can one find them at the right moment? And how can the content on eco-friendly sustainable living be more present in people’s daily lives? One of the goals of the Marthas’ massive digital leap was to ensure that alongside the lingonberry porridge recipe, visitors to the website would also explore other content and the Martha way of life. The aim was to create more meaningful interactions with visitors.

From this specific need, a solution was born: an easy-to-use mobile application. The Martha Association aims to provide reliable advice for everyone’s daily life, including new target groups that can be reached through the mobile app. The Martha Association decided to bring their most beloved content into the mobile application.

Engagement through personal touch

The Martha Association wanted to create an easy-to-use, free, and engaging mobile application. This is in line with the association’s digital strategy, which emphasizes increasing the engagement and interaction with their content. Especially reaching young adults and getting them involved in Martha-esque activities was a priority.

The mobile app offers customized and personalized content. The app is personal and unique to each user. The Martha app can be modified according to your liking by telling it your interests – which makes sure that you’ll receive just the content and reminders that are relevant to you.

Whipped porridge and wooly socks – from a good everyday life to a better world

The app would represent the association’s motto from a good everyday life to a better world: the main objective for the app would be to make people’s everyday life better and encourage them in a light way to make sustainable choices. Today’s youth is still interested in grandma’s cleaning tips, such as cleaning with vinegar or baking soda. Through the app, the Marthas can reach even more people and bring martha-ing to everyday life by bringing cleaning and gardening tips to everyone’s pockets.

There are reminders in the app that you can subscribe to remind you when it’s time to defrost the freezer or clean the coffee maker – making sure you’ll get it done.

The Martha app is one-of-a-kind

There is no other Finnish application like this one that combines recipes with household content. While preparing an oven dish, you can also check the instructions for cleaning the oven. If you’re looking for a fish soup recipe, perhaps you’d like to peek at the instructions for handling fish at the same time? The starting point for the Martha app was to create a comprehensive package for sustainable everyday living that evolves together with the users.

The Marthas’ recipes stand out from the instructions provided by other food apps and recipe banks in that the Marthas’ recipes are guaranteed to be suitable for everyday life. They are easy, quick, healthy, and cost-effective. The ingredient list is short, and you can easily find the necessary ingredients at your local store, minimizing food waste.

The Marthas are masters at utilizing local ingredients, and making the most of seasonal produce is at the heart of their culinary advice. Seasonal food recipes have quickly become user favorites in the app. In addition to food recipes, the app also provides information on how to use items like lemons for cleaning and how to grow indoor plants from seeds.

What’s also unique is the ability to add your own recipe to the app. You can add your own recipe as text, an image, or a link, so all those screenshots, photos from print magazines, and links to favorite recipes can now be easily collected in one place. It’s delightful to attach your own photo to a recipe from your cooking experiments. When you save your favorite holiday dessert recipe in the app now, you won’t have to wonder what the best recipe was next holiday season. The app includes ready-made Martha’s menus that can be easily customized by replacing options with your own favorites. Users can even create their own menu that’s always conveniently at hand. Planning reduces food waste, which is why good planning tools were added to the app.

The Martha app aims to revolutionize housekeeping. As unique content, the decision was made to create a household reminders function. With this feature, users can set reminders for everyday tasks, such as changing sheets or watering plants. The Marthas’ recommendations come with suggested frequencies, but users can customize the timing themselves, whether they want a reminder once a week on Thursdays or once a month on Saturdays. The Martha app truly remembers for you!

The technical execution

The Martha app is an easy-to-use application built with React Native for both iOS and Android. In the app, content can be personalized according to the user’s preferences through shortcuts and filtering.

The app was developed in close collaboration with users. The testing group included people of different ages, both Martha members and non-members from different parts of Finland. Valuable feedback was collected from them on two different versions of the app before its release.

The Martha app offers a wide range of features and content, including:

• Imported recipes from Martha’s website, featuring beloved household tips and advice for sustainable living, from mushroom picking to vegetable gardening.
• Instructions for everyday tasks and the ability to set reminders for them.
• Martha Community: A platform for discussions and Q&A on various topics, fostering a sense of community among users.
• Martha Notebook: A place to save favorite content from Marthas’ recipes and tips, create personal menus, and store recipes for future use.
• Celebration Kit: Special packages for holidays such as Christmas, Easter, and spring festivities, offering ideas for flower arrangements, gift wrapping, table settings, baking recipes, and more.