Donation Website Design
Our team developed an all-in-one donation platform to amplify millennials' donations.
Context
We investigated millennial donations in the US. Millennials give twice as much money to charity per year than Baby Boomers or Gen Z. We thought that given the generosity of this generation, they’d have a donation strategy and a clear set of parameters to guide their frequent giving.
Challenge
Due to constant exposure to evolving global and local issues, millennials are overwhelmed by opportunities to give. We wanted to create a platform that provides guidance for their personal giving strategy.
Solution
Through ideating with millennials about these opportunities, we surfaced two ideas to amplify millennials' donations: a quiz to support reflection and education about personal donating habits and a donation management platform to track and create donation goals.
We called our platform PopGive, and it consists of three simple steps: Take the quiz, Explore your recommendations, and Customize your dashboard.
Key Features
Feature 1 : Donation Pop Quiz
We offer pop quizzes for donors so that they can figure out what charities and causes they are interested in. Through the result page, users receive recommendations for philanthropy causes and can compare donation statistics with other donors their age who are in the same income bracket.
Feature 2 : Dashboard
PopGive analyzes users' responses for the donation Pop Quizzes and sets up the personalized dashboard for each Pop Giver. Users can manage their donations easily through the dashboard by saving the charities for later and simply donating at any time by clicking a button. In additional, they can track their giving history, set their donation reminder frequency and budget, and compare their giving to their peers.
Key Insights
Theme 1 : Ad hoc donors
Ad hoc donations are the most common strategy for millennials. They require limited planning and align with their ad hoc budgeting approach.
Theme 2 : Personal factors for donations
Millennial donation approaches are formed from a myriad of factors stemming from personal connection to the issue.
Theme 3 : Lack of resource
Donation education is needed, and there is no existing resource that empowers millennial donors to donate with confidence.
Theme 4 : Trust threshold
Social media and personal connections seem to reduce the high transparency and trust threshold millennials usually place on charities when making donation decisions.
Our Vision
Philanthropy is and will continue to be a significant contributor to solving our community and environmental challenges. It is an under-researched space with limited innovation. We have the opportunity to create a tool that enables millennials to be considerate about how they give, how much they give, and why they give, interrupting the current cycle of giving that is grounded in misconceptions and ultimately perpetuates inequalities.
User Testing Highlights
Theme 1 : Making the copy more comprehensive and clear
We rewrote the Home page copy to make it easier for users to understand. Recognizing that users cannot be classified into two labels, we removed the labels for 'ad hoc' and 'strategic.' Lastly, we refined the quiz questions for clarity by adding some examples.
Theme 2 : Enhancing the user-experience
Our team removed redundancies and unnecessary pages (i.e., the in-between page from quiz to results). We realized that the pre-existing donate button was not noticeable and immediately added a clearer donate CTA to the dashboard in a prominent color. In addition, the daily recommendations were revised using users' recommendations on preferred frequency, further reflecting the characteristics of millennials. We also removed the recommendations from the quiz result page to incentivize the users to signup for the dashboard.
Theme 3 : Refining Business Model
We accurately specified commission to emphasize transparency around the business model: "PopGive has a flat 5% fee on all donations. It is optional to cover this fee at the time of donation."
Takeaway
This was a collaborative industry project, and I led the entire design process. Each role was clearly divided to enable efficient work and share diverse perspectives and experiences. However, being the only designer is a double-edged sword. While I had the full autonomy to decide the project visual and prototype, I had no one to bounce ideas off of or validate my assumptions. This makes collecting user feedback extremely vital in the process. The experience of making a better product with user feedback was very insightful.
This project took a long time to verify the concept and business model of our product. We heard feedback from many people, and through this, the team kept iterating with strategies and concepts. I think there was a lack of detail about prototype with time constraint, but I was able to experience an entrepreneurial mind.