Our team was tasked with evaluating how university fundraisers operate under the current circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic. Previously, fundraisers would travel and meet in-person with donors to foster relationships, but this may have changed since the onset of the pandemic. Thus, we have been tasked with identifying whether or not the fundraising process has shifted due to the pandemic and to adapt to any changes as a result. We added on to the existing tool for university fundraisers to foster meaningful relationships despite any changes to their workflow due to the pandemic.
In the semester long project, I played a strong role in identifying the direction and final design. Throughout the project, I conducted around 20 interviews with University Fundraisers, trying to identify insights into their pain paints in the current fundraising process. After identifying takeaways, I played a large role in ideating and designing a "All in One CRM" for University Fundraisers to utilize during their traveling/fundraising process.
In order to start our project, our team needed to get a good understanding of the university fundraising problem space. For the first few weeks of our project, I led the charge in identifying actionable takeaways which led in to our next phase, user interviews.
After the team understood the university fundraising problem space, I led 20 user interviews with University Fundraisers from William Jewell, Purdue, and Boston College in order to find pain points within the current fundraising process.
At the end of the project, our team identified a solution that could solve University Fundraiser pain points. We decided to create an "all in one CRM" to centralize their complex process. I championed the scheduling part of the application.
Here are the high fidelity prototypes that I created at the end of the semester. After creating medium fidelity mockups, I created these to hand off to our sponsor.
To see how we got to this design, keep reading.
Below you will find our teams process to come up with our final designs. Our process consisted of research, interviews, ideation, and user testing.
First, our team conducted literature reviews to introduce the team to the fundraising space by gaining a baseline understanding of the fundraising and product-led growth.
We compiled our research into a board and summarized our findings. We individually searched for key-words and phrases such as “Product-Led,” “Remote Meetings,” “Remote Donating,” and “Alumni Fundraising”, as these were key words that were often brought up when we talked with our sponsor.
From this activity, it allowed us to create meaningful interview questions for our project. The feedback we receive from our interviews guided us to a progressive path in successfully completing the project. Through this research, we also gained a better understanding of some uncommon words and phrases. This helped us become more knowledgeable before communicating with our sponsor and with our fundraiser interviewees.
To understand the current workflow of university fundraising professionals and identify if the workflow has shifted due to the current circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic. If there have been no changes, we aim to gain an understanding of their existing pain points and additional opportunities within this problem space.
We interviewed a total of 9 people. These included 2 from Trine, 1 from Williams, 5 from Purdue, and 1 from Cornell. Their job titles were: directors of development, development officers, director of project management, & principal gifts.
From these interviews, we created interview summaries. Once we compiled these summaries, our team analyzed the information from these interviews to obtain actionable takeaways in order to identify common pain points within the fundraising space which can be found in the next section.
After conducting interviews, we wanted to synthesize the information gathered and to identify trends and themes while targeting specific pain points and opportunities to begin ideating.
The key sections within this diagram were:
Emphasizing alumni passions: The largest aspect of a fundraiser’s job is connecting with donors and talking to them about what they would most want to donate to the school for, and making their money count towards their passion at the university.
Virtual event planning: Due to COVID-19, fundraisers have had a lot of success with virtual events, but they can be difficult to plan and get donors to attend.
Communication platform issues: There are many different and separate platforms of communication that fundraisers must utilize, and information is easily lost or forgotten.
Our team continued interviews with the prospect of narrowing our scope further. We updated our protocol to learn more about the specifics of the fundraising process which led our team to narrow our scope to calendar and expense tracking features.
We decided to do another round of interviews to gain an understanding of the stakeholders and hierarchy present within major gift fundraising teams, to outline the communication process within major gift fundraising teams (when and how they communicate, with whom, and for what reasons), and to identify ways that fundraisers show their appreciation for and send gifts to donors.
From these three interviews, we found complaints about: The number of different communication platforms they must utilize, the struggle to keep track of different communication events, and expense tracking while on fundraising trips means holding onto all paper receiptsInability to use CRM information usefully and quickly while on fundraising trips
From these interviews, we found the information that validated our proposed pivot: to move into creating an expense tracking and calendar application. However, this left us with the question: should we create a new app or add on to the existing affinity app?
This decision could not be made within our team, so we had to take it to the fundraisers. We received feedback such as, “Not all the information is in one system. You’re consistently going back and forth” and “We do not have an app that you can put all of the CRM information in and also do the expense report”.
After conducting multiple interviews with university fundraisers about communications both externally and internally within fundraising teams, we decided to move away from communications. Given people's desire to stick with their existing communication apps and our limited time left with the project, we moved away from making an application to centralize this communication process for fundraisers.
Another takeaway we obtained from interviews was that expense tracking and a centralized calendar were needed in this fundraising process due to the painful processes they currently have.
We decided to move in the direction of creating an app with both an expense tracking feature and a calendar feature to help centralize the fundraisers traveling process. With this information in mind, our team finalized our problem statement:
“Major gift university fundraisers who travel to meet donors need a way to centralize their expense tracking and calendar processes during their business trips.”
Our team conducted market research to familiarize ourselves with expense tracking and calendar apps norder to understand the common features, discover pros and cons of different components, and gather ideas for possible extensions on the current app.
From this activity, we found that most of the popular calendars on the market all showed monthly, weekly, and daily views. This allows users to easily access the details of events they have created. Most apps also allow for color coding of their events for categorization purposes.
We noted that it may be important to integrate existing map apps and CRM donor information into our app, as one click on the meeting address can show the navigation to the set location.
From our research into the expense tracking freature, we found that:
Receipt scanning automatically parses receipts and imports details by simply taking a photo of the receipt. This will save time as the biggest pain-point with the current non-digital expense tracking process is the abundance of physical receipt copies.
Per diem view, which shows current budget and spending, will help fundraisers keep track of expenses to be correctly reimbursed upon returning.
Having a filter/search/sort by date feature will allow fundraisers to efficiently organize through past trips. This feature will be useful because many fundraisers expressed that they go through past trips often for reimbursement, reminders, and to plan future trips.
After market research, our team decided to do intial sketching to summarize the findings and apply our knowledge to create an overall layout for higher fidelity prototypes.
From the initial sketching, we implemented monthly, weekly, and daily calendar views to maintain consistency with the layout of the most commonly used calendars such as Outlook & Google Calendar, that we discovered through market research.
The integration between CRM and expense report allows for convenience. This way, the fundraisers do not have to go back and forth between multiple systems, and can process everything online.
Our focus when creating mid-fidelity mockups was how to add the features into the app rather than usability as that was more important to our users.
Our goal in conducting concept testing was to test the concept of our mid-fidelity prototypes and receive feedback from university fundraisers.
In order to gain an understanding about our mid-fidelity prototypes our team conducted one round of concept testing with eight university fundraisers from both Purdue University and Williams College.
Focusing on the calendar and expense tracking features we learned that fundraisers were overwhelmingly excited about having a way to organize their expense tracking as most have to keep all of their receipts or record expenses by hand. They were also happy to have a mobile version of their calendar that was integrated with their donor profiles.
Although we received mainly positive feedback, these quotes do not necessarily speak to the user experience of the features. So, our team has taken a deeper look into the feedback from each testing session in order to analyze the data for iterations.
Our goal from this activity was to gain a better understanding of the feedback given during testing sessions in order to apply them to the iterations of the mid-fidelity mockups.
During each testing session one team member took notes while another was conducting the interview. From those notes our team was able to compile the main feedback from university fundraisers found during these testing sessions (first image).
We then took these insights and iterated on our final designs.
Our goal was to improve our wireframes based on the feedback we received from user and concept testing. After these, I made high fidelity mockups which are shown at the top of the page.
This project was heavily focused on research. With the circumstances of the covid-19 pandemic, our project was initially focused on trying to create a solution around that problem space. As our project progressed, our research showed how problems fundraisers of university face are not limited to just the covid-19 pandemic. With this realization, we were able to not only support the research of the existing solution but also have the opportunity to improve upon it by adding a calendar and expense tracking feature. The end result was a design we as a group are proud of and a solution that is supported with proper research, testing, and ready to be passed onto our sponsor for future iteration and implementation.
