PEER TO PEER FUNDRAISING
Overhauling our fundraising platform for donors and organizations alike
NEON GIVING DAYS, NEON CRM, NEON FUNDRAISE
2024
PROTOTYPING
USER RESEARCH
RESPONSIVE DESIGN
INTRODUCTION
PROJECT BRIEF
Peer to peer fundraising is a means by which individuals can create fundraising campaigns and leverage their personal networks on behalf of an organization. While the Giving Days, Fundraise, and CRM products all had some form of peer to peer fundraising, we wanted to create a new, contemporary, and visually consistent fundraising platform to unify the products and provide the best possible experience for our organizations and individual fundraisers, alike.
THE CHALLENGE
Our previous fundraising pages were woefully outdated in both appearance and function. This was not only an issue on the front-end donor facing pages, but also on the back end administrative side. We needed to overhaul the fundraising platform to make things easier for both organization administrators and fundraiser creators alike. Due to the nature of peer to peer fundraising, there is no expectation of prior experience in the kind of back-end setup and content creation on the part of the fundraiser creators. These are people who are simply trying to raise money for a cause they believe in, and we needed to make sure we were making it easy for them to promote a beautiful page with minimal work.
APPROACH
Fundraising is a cornerstone of the service we provide, it is a uniquely high-impact feature that requires careful, thoughtful consideration in its approach. Collaboration between our different products and product teams was crucial. This project marked one of the first ventures of re-aligning the position of the design team to have a seat at the table with product management in planning and strategy. For the peer-to-peer fundraising project, I worked closely with product management as a whole as a collaborative partner – helping establish the requirements for the project, as well as being the advocate for the different cohorts of end users. It was an exercise in balancing business needs with user empathy, and the collaboration with design at an early stage gave us the confidence that we were building the right thing the first time around. We leveraged user interviews and feedback from NeonCRM, Neon Fundraise, and Neon Giving Days to create a cohesive, in-depth picture of what a modern fundraising platform needs, and direction on how to make the feature versatile and configurable enough to work across our product family.
SOLUTIONS
FRONT END
In order to build a more modern and visually striking front end experience, we completely overhauled our pages, creating a content-forward series of page templates. By standardizing the templates for these pages, we minimized the degree of customization required on the parts of both the organizations and fundraisers alike. An organization admin would need only to upload a single brand color and hero image and they would have a full suite of fundraising pages ready to publish.
Mission statements were pulled from the organization’s profile data and page verbiage was customizable, but pre-generated and templated on first approach. Donors were able to create a fundraising page or team through a newly designed creation flow. Page templates were designed mobile-first to prioritize the handheld device experience.
DONOR DASHBOARD
The donor, fundraiser, and company giving dashboards were also a considerable update to the back-end approaches in each product. Each product handled fundraiser/team management and donation information differently, so these new back-end dashboards were designed with the intention of unifying the experiences companywide.
Features on the donor dashboard included :
Data visualization to contextualize and display donation behavior, fundraising performance, and goal progress
Donation History, which showed donors their previous donations (and allowed them to manage recurring gifts/export their history to Excel) and allowed fundraisers to see the donations that have come in
Team Management for fundraisers, which allowed joining teams, adding members, and updating team pages for team captains.
And Fundraiser Management functionality to create, edit, and provide updates on active fundraising campaign pages.
CONCLUSION
FEEDBACK AND OUTCOMES
The new fundraising and donor experience was tested with 15 clients through moderated, remote interactive prototype testing for both the front and back end experiences. Those tested were impressed with the new visual direction, found the new experience easy and convenient to use, and anticipated a major reduction on time spent creating fundraisers. In our followup conversations, we learned that the fundraising process had been a major pain point, and those clients tested and interviewed were excited about the new changes.
