Overhauling our fundraising platform for donors and organizations alike
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.
Our previous fundraising pages were woefully outdated in both appearance and function.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.
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.
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.
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.