The New Story Donor's Dashboard Redesign

Project

The design is a reimagining of how the donor dashboard can be used to stimulate active donor participation and deepen engagement between New Story and its donors. New Story is a nonprofit on a mission to end global homeless and build thriving communities in developing countries. They do this by partnering with local experts and governments, by building affordable and sustainable houses, and by sourcing innovative solutions (e.g., 3D printing) that can help them build stronger homes faster at low cost. We successfully presented our design to the Head of Engineering at New Story who expressed interest in integrating key elements of our design into their dashboard.

My Role

I was one of four key members (others: Walter Moura, Maurice Arnold, Jingyi Zhao). My responsibility covered user research and user journey mapping, design ideation, prototyping in Figma, documentation and presentation. We successfully presented the upgraded dashboard to Director of Engineering at New Story

Problem

Donor Retention and Lack of Donor Participation

New Story faced the problem of donor retention and lack of active participation. According to them, the drop-off rate after first donation was high, and the charity was looking for creative ways of using technology to resolve this problem

“They hear about us in the media, they get excited about our work, and they come to our website. They donate, and they just drop off from there.”

– Tim Whitacre, Director of Engineering, New Story

Challenge

How might we build engagement that will increase donor retention and active participation?

With knowledge of the problem the organization was facing, we came up with three challenge goals – help donors better visualize the potential and impact of their donations, create deepened engagement between New Story and its donors, and transform passive donor participation to active engagement.

Design Process

Research

Market Research

We did a deep dive into how national and multinational nonprofits engage with their donors. We found that charities with active donor participation had engagement strategies, on both local and national levels, which fostered community building. These communities served as rallying points for people who shared in the organization’s mission. The charity often use social media to generate buzz around local activities and spark conversations. We also found that some organizations had acknowledgement and reward mechanisms to encourage active participation in campaigns to increase donations.

Insight from the Market Research

Organizations with active donors participation find creative ways of drawing their donors to the heart of their mission. Thus, the donors feel they are directly impacting the lives of real people and not just supporting a faceless organization.

User Research

User Interview and Online Research

We conducted interviews with 16 active nonprofit donors for more insight into their motivations for charitable giving, and experiences with organizations they currently support. Online research also gave us insight into New Story donors’ relationship with technology.

Insight from the User Research

Although donors admire the work of New Story, they felt emotionally detached from its mission. Furthermore, we were able to effectively define the demography of New Story’s donors. They are technologically savvy millennials and highly receptive to digital engagement that would draw them closer to the heart of New Story’s mission.

Synthesis

Empathy mapping gave us a glimpse into donors’ emotions that catalyze the desire to give, and their expectations when it comes to communication and engagement by the charity. Affinity mapping helped us synthesize overlapping goals, needs and pain points.

Persona and Journey Mapping

From the data collected during the user research, we were able to create personas of donors.

Creating a user journey map helped us home in on donor’s goals, needs and pain points.

Design Exploration

Through research, we discovered that a personalized experience would give donors a sense of ownership of their engagement with New Story. So, we decided on a visual design that would connect a donor directly to the impact of their donation.

New Features

We introduced four new features – detailed donation information, immersive virtual tour of a New Story home, social media sharing, digital incentives for active engagement – to the donor dashboard.

User Flow

We created a user flow that we thought would be the most frictionless steps that will lead our users to their end goal from the moment they arrive on the website.

Quick Iterations

Using Figma, we quickly began exploring different visual designs for the dashboard. For the home, we built the model using Autodesk Fusion 360 and Unreal Engine Twinmotion for the final rendering.

Dashboard

Low-Fidelity Mockup

High-Fidelity Prototype

New Story Home Prototype

3D Model

Rendered Home

Usability Testing

The goals of our usability testing were to observe how users would interact with the new dashboard, identify their pain points, assess their task completion time, and learn if there are other user needs that are not met.

From the usability testing, we were able to confirm that our functionalities worked well, and the users found the features useful. They particularly liked the virtual tour and shareable features. We learned that the average time it took for users to complete their tasks (40 seconds) was less than we originally projected (under 30 seconds).

Furthermore, some donors expressed their desire for anonymity and control over the content they can share on social media. They further suggested that we consider reducing the number of achievements to avoid visual overload. We also discovered that some of the terminologies we used for some features were not clear to users.

Enhancements Based on the Usability Testing

We reinforced donor anonymity by offering a selection of default avatars to donors who do not want to use their photos
We limited the number of achievements on the achievements to twelve (12) to avoid overwhelming users.
We provided the flexibility for users to customize the auto-generated content to maximize control over shareability on social media
We minimized technical jargon to enhance user comprehension of the features – “virtual tour” instead of “visualizer”.

The Outcome

The upgraded dashboard is a stark contrast to what New Story had. For the first time, donors can now see details about their donations and how their donations have contributed to the lives of others. Capitalizing on their use of technology, they can also tour a New Story home and share their involvement with their family and friends. The new design retained features, such as the ability to print tax receipts, from the old dashboard.