Improving donor monitoring and engagement for nonprofits
A simple yet powerful donor database for non-profit organizations to monitor donor activity enabling engagement and relationship-building in a single platform
3 months
RallyUp.com
Online
Q3 2022
UX & Interaction Designer
CEO / Director of Product / 2 PMs / 5 Engineers / UI Designer / UX Writer / Director of Customer Success
The Product
RallyUp is a technology company in the non-profit tech industry that offers an online fundraising solution — in the form of SaaS — for organizations and companies of any size to raise funds for good causes and manage their donor base, all in one place. The product is an interactive fundraising platform that allows its users to create various types of fundraising experiences, share them with donors, raise and track donations, and more.
The Problem
Users didn't have enough valuable donor information within the platform to make key decisions
These users rely on 3rd-party CRM integrations to transfer the data they need but managing different platforms and going back and forth between them is a time- and resource-wasting problem. There’s not enough CRM-like functionality in our product to help them take immediate action to increase donor engagement — our users' most precious metric.
User segments
Mid-sized Organizations
This segment needed a new way to discover their donor's motivations and behaviour without throwing their “budget” out of the window. Often not a 3dr-party CRM user.
Large to Enterprise Organizations
This segment required more advanced data features including advanced tracking and reporting of donors and their activity, all within the platform. They are familiar with other CRMs already.
The evolution
From a basic table to a full-fledged database
Users could only see names, emails and total donations. All other important data was missing.
From basic transaction data to full behavioural information
Donation data could only be seen per transaction. Users were forced to see each transaction individually to gain somewhat useful insights from the donors.
Key pain points and insights from initial research with users
Most of our enterprise-level feature developments start with conversations with our biggest accounts in the form of interviews and through email and document sharing
Identified most commonly CRM platforms used by our users
We tried to stick with the most popular ones for inspiration to get familiar with our users' current environments and to discover opportunities for feature implementation while matching our users' current mental model
Key take away
Most of these platforms have a high level of complexity when setting them up as integrations and their interfaces are not for everyone. We wanted to focus on a very simple and intuitive experience to ease the cognitive effort needed to use the new feature
Consolidating learnings
After finally defining the main problem, we got down to business and defined the user goal at a high level, business OKRs, JTBDs, and specific user stories we wanted to tackle in this release
User goal
To ease the process of understanding and engaging with donors at different stages of the relationship-building journey
Business goal
By offering a more dynamic set of donor data with reduced effort, we were envisioning an overall increase in platform usage tied to our new premium subscription offering, which would ultimately lead to increased revenue by the end of the year.
Epic
As a non-profit, I want to learn about who our donors are and understand their giving behaviour so that I have a clear image of when and how to engage with them and what incentivize them to give more and more often to our causes.
Key task-based user stories
As a non-profit, I want to monitor the quantity and type of donors on my fundraisers so that we can analyze engagement and success of our initiatives.
As a non-profit, I want to easily access donor information so that we can reach them at the best time based on our content strategy.
As a non-profit, I want to be able to categorize our donor base so that we can segment and target a specific donor base for a more personalized marketing implementation.
As a non-profit, I want to monitor and track donor activity so that we can create and promote the right fundraisers they care about at the right time.
The main challenge
Provided that our platform had limited information and limited scalability, we needed to work out a solution that would allow for a more dynamic set of data by adding new behavioural donor information that could be better organized, easily accessible, and quickly digestible.
Available data
Personal & Contact information
New data set
Behavioural & Interaction information
The principles we defined to reach our goal
Intuitive UI
Provide an intuitive space to store and display essential donor behaviour information, donation activity and key communications tracking with relationship-boosting built-in tools within the right context that’s easily accessible at any given time
Helpful guidance
Implement an intuitive guided walk-through for first time users of the feature. Since it’s a feature within a familiar platform for mostly existing users, it would be rather simple by highlighting only what’s new to them making the learning experience a breeze
Powerful, but flexible
Deploy an enough powerful CRM-like feature that won’t require the use of 3rd party integrations to achieve the same goal for the most part, while still providing the flexibility of integrations for those advanced users who need a complementary, full-fledged CRM platform
Shaping the solution
We started experimenting with two new features for our users: a Revamped Donor Database, and Donor Profiles
1. Revamped Donor Database
Since we wanted to provide an end-to-end intuitive experience for our users to access their donor data, we decided to update the old donor database for a more consistent experience and scalable design approach (this design language was later applied to the rest of the databases throughout the platform). With this update we introduced a few new elements for easier navigation, narrowing down needed data, and easy to reach common actions such as bulk emailing supporters.
2. Donor Profiles
The core feature we would offer to our users. It would enable new functionality that was non-existent before alongside more donor information available which would help organizations understand better and engage more with their community from a single platform. No more headaches.
Important considerations we kept in mind
From our current platform
Items that impact the overall experience but that will be worked on in the near future to avoid the same problems next time around
Not great navigation
Current donor table and donations table are separate pages. This means that, to see more information about a certain donor, the user is taken to a different page and need to navigate back and forth between them. Not good. All donor info should live in the same space.
Mixed flows
Current donations table page is used in a filtered state when requesting more data from a certain donor. It’s also used as the global donations data base for a whole fundraiser. This is not ideal for clean navigation so the donor should have it’s own set of data (own space).
Information architecture could be better
Donation details can only be seen on the global donations data base but not on the donor data base. We will need a way to consolidate this data under one place for easy access and navigation.
Constrained, not scalable design
Our current data base design won’t allow for more rich data without starting to get messy. We will need to revisit current components and revamp the data base designs for scalability.
From our existing users
Some limitations we had to work around due to the nature of the demographic of our target market
Not very tech savvy
Most of our users are not tech savvy. They can get confused or lost with the most basic of patterns on a SaaS platform. We need an interface friendly and obvious enough but robust enough for users to benefit from the new feature but without overwhelming them.
Older demographic
Most charity organizations admins and managers on our user base are from the Gen X to Boomers generation (~40-65) with a traditional mindset about tech, with exceptions of course. New, modern interaction patterns might be too complicated to understand for fast adoption. Ideally, we will try to keep the patterns they’re familiar with already.
Devices
We understand that most of our users don’t have access to powerful devices so we need to keep in mind performance and speed over a fancy user interface.
Interesting fact...
Despite being a desktop-focused platform due to its complexity, our user base also rely on their mobile devices to perform complex tasks and monitor their fundraisers on certain occasions. This means that we needed to make sure this new feature performs very well and is responsive and intuitive on their smartphones as well through our webapp.
The results in detail
Revamped Donor Database
After various explorations, we achieved a good balance between information architecture and intuitiveness. Although we added a significant amount of information to the page, it was very digestible and easy to find, even highlighting essential data that wasn't accessible before.
New Donor Profiles
By fully focusing on the principles we defined, we were happy to find a way to display the new behavioural information in a way that's intuitive and flexible without breaking the experience. The overlay drawer solution allows users to access this information even from other pages in a single click without losing context.
Performance after a successful feature release
Below are some of the main positive highlights that told us it was worth the effort and the right decision to make.
Increase in premium subscribers (MRR)
Our BizDev folks decided that this highly anticipated and requested feature would be one of the main incentives for our premium subscription package which led to more users subscribing
Increase in average donations received
Now that organizations had more ways to understand their donors, they were able to put a better strategy in place that led to more often, higher donations from our users donor base
Increase in premium features usage
Since this feature was bundled with other amazing features (like full-fledged email marketing capabilities, for instance), users were able to try and leverage these tools for better fundraisers overall
Lots of kudos to our team
Our customer success team is one of the best (if not the best) in the market and our users appreciate that. And when user are happy, they let us know. We received a lot of kudos after launch
What we're looking forward to
Despite being a successful launch, there were things we had to sacrifice to allow for a faster, more efficient initial release. We know this is important for our power-users, so we want to keep developing this feature into something great that can compete directly with the big names in the CRM industry. These are some of the new additions and optimizations we plan to add to the feature in next phases:
Combine donor profiles with our full email marketing capabilities
The email capabilities of the shipped feature are pretty basic. You target a donor, open its profile, send an email (or select multiple and send a bulk email). We want to provide more advanced, drip email marketing functionality on the next iterations
Add more essential CRM features for a all-in-one experience
Full-fledged CRMs have the advantage of offering very specific features that are used by highly-effective teams. We want to bring some of those features to our platform to provide the one platform to do it (mostly) all
Do more research to discover new opportunities to improve upon
Unfortunately, we didn’t have the budget nor the time for a full research cycle. We're hoping that next time we will invest more in this phase to uncover new opportunities of improvement that will bring our users even more excitement towards this amazing feature
Stack used
