UNIVERSAL DONATION FORM
Creating a versatile, cutting edge donation form for use across all company products.
NEON GIVING DAYS, NEON CRM, NEON FUNDRAISE
2024
PROTOTYPING
USER RESEARCH
RESPONSIVE DESIGN
INTRODUCTION
PROJECT BRIEF
Neon One is a platform that, at it’s core, serves as a means of empowering non-profit organizations to do the most good. One of the most crucial means of achieving this goal is by accepting donations. As a company comprised of several different products, and with a mind towards the unification of these products, we wanted to standardize our donation forms company-wide. Our new forms must be both functionally and visually versatile, and must be built with ease.
THE CHALLENGE
Donation forms differ by platform in both functionality and appearance, and while organizations aim to collect voluntary user data, the current forms often feel overwhelming across platforms. To be effective, these forms also need to support host branding, ensuring a consistent and trustworthy user experience.
A persistent issue we discovered from user feedback was the overwhelming length of our previous forms. These old forms were either a single-page form that could be configured to be endlessly long, or were comprised of an indeterminate series of pages (which could also be endlessly long. The issue rooted from the function of the form – organizations were using these forms to collect a myriad variety of donor information, and while this data was important and useful, it was not necessarily relevant to the task at hand – the donation.
Additionally, from a research and data perspective, we had the challenge of working data blind, as Neon did not have a centralized database of donor demographic information. We had to rely on industry best-practices, market research, and testing feedback to inform our design decisions.
SOLUTIONS
DONATION FORMS
Our solution to the issue of donation abandonment and donor overwhelm was to reduce the length of the form to three steps – donation selection, donor information, and payment. The new form is a focused experience – it allows for a reasonable degree of information collection, but prioritizes the task at hand for both donors and organizations.
The form itself is configurable in its appearance and options, and is able to be embedded onto a page or triggered as a lightbox modal.
FORM BUILDER
The form builder is an overhaul of existing form editor capabilities. Each page of the form is presented as either a preview state or an edit state where fields and options can be configured. The form builder also allows for custom fields to be created within the form itself, without having to navigate to an external page to manage custom fields.
Branding and visual design were also a major consideration, as we needed to the form to be able to be aesthetically consistent with an organizations brand identity. Our theme builder allows for customization and templating to allow the organization to create a form that exists seamlessly within their site pages.
FOLLOWUP
After launching our new universal donation form and its builder, we collected feedback from organizations and found there was still room for improvement on the efficiency of the form. In order to further reduce the friction on the donation experience, we built an express donation form that reduces the data collection to only the absolutely necessary information (email, payment info) and allows the donor to give with potentially a single click thanks to integrations with Apple Pay/Google Pay, Paypal, and Venmo.
CONCLUSION
FEEDBACK AND OUTCOMES
The new Universal Donation Form was a lesson in restraint and curation of an experience. We found that donors and organizations alike found more value in a streamlined, focused, and deliberate form, rather than an ambiguous, infinitely configurable form. Through client feedback sessions and NPS responses, we confirmed that people using this form (donors and administrators alike) felt unimpeded in their goal, our goal – to make the most good happen.
FINAL THOUGHTS
One of the challenges that persisted throughout the work at Neon was the consideration that the people creating forms are not necessarily professional form builders (if such a career exists) – these are administrative staffers whose responsibilities are focused on the good their organization does. By providing some guidance and establishing boundaries within our form building experience, we allowed those administrators to make fewer decisions, work less on our back-end, and get back to their mission. With this new form and building process, we gave organizations the ability to configure their donation experience as much as needed – viable out of the box, but with plenty of space to fine-tune.
For donors, we made it easier to give to the causes that matter to them, cutting out the unnecessary friction, and providing a thoughtful, focused donation form.
This donation form was also a success internally – it not only unified several product experiences, but was an exploratory foray into cross-team collaboration. By setting a design standard across our different products, we were able to get closer to our goal of fostering a holistic environment through which non-profit organizations could rally the support they need to further their cause.
