Next Generation Fundraising
Shaping the roadmap for the future of fundraising
Role
UX Lead
Timeframe
April 2022 to January 2023
Work
Product Strategy, Design Thinking, Workshop Facilitation, UX/UI Design, UX Research
The Challenge
Our team at Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud had an opportunity to reimagine fundraising for organizations across our industries. Our early goals for the product were to:
Empower fundraisers to react to changing industry and social trends and ultimately raise more dollars
Make it easy to buy, set up, learn, and use - even for inexperienced fundraisers
Beat our competition on fundraising and major-giving specific point solutions
Differentiate with the ability to tell the whole story of impact end-to-end
Discovery and Definition
User Interviews
Journey Maps
I worked closely with our researchers who conducted studies with our prospect customers and partners on the mass market fundraising and implementation experiences. Translating their insights and building on top of the existing wealth of fundraising knowledge on our project team, I produced 4 journey maps to visualize the end-to-end user journey across our project pillars:
Mass Market
High Touch Giving
Implementation
Fundraising Operations
One of four journey maps: the Mass Market Journey
Personas
We also built a wealth of knowledge across our product team interviews with existing and prospective customers, developing a deeper understanding of the key audiences in the fundraising space. Personas were created to outline the needs, jobs and pain points to inform a successful solution.
Design Workshops
Snapshots of our Day 2 Mass Market workshop collaboration board
Following rounds of research and analysis, I planned and facilitated the project kick off with 4 design workshops across the major project pillars, hosted virtually for our geographically dispersed team across AMER and APAC. The workshop goals and outcomes were:
Engage with our project stakeholders across leadership, technology, business/UX and subject matter experts
Explore and share perspectives and research on topics
Align on impact goals
Articular our design challenge
Empathize with our key users
Generate ideas (for MVP consideration and roadmap planning)
Ideate and Validate
To converge on the insights gathered during discovery and definition, I created a number of artifacts to help set the foundation for the design process and effective execution downstream. This included user and data flows, information architecture diagrams to showcase connected systems and data flows across various Salesforce products, as well as current versus future state maps to ground the team on where we are to where we want to go.
Process Diagrams
Experience Vision
We used storytelling to present our experience vision during our Theme Reviews and Product Briefs with product leadership. This is a snapshot of the storyboard as part of that planning process, parsing out various scenes with features and users to depict the end-to-end vision of what we plan to build.
Experience Roadmap
I facilitated a lot of activities to inform and influence the experience roadmap, including:
MVP Prioritization to determine key features we need to develop in the first two releases
Reviewing our impact goals for the business and our users/customers
Completing the business model canvas to expand the perspective of our thinking beyond the product
UX Wireframes and UI Designs
While MVP requirements were being defined and the North Star vision was being formulated, I also began iterative and progressive development of designs. Beginning with sketches and wireframes, I used these tools to focus on content prioritization, highlighting functionality and intended behaviours.
Prospective Donor Profile Wireframes
Detailed design of Prospective Donor Profile using Salesforce Lightning Design System
Interim Results
MVP Definition
North Star Vision
Resource Plan
Design Influence
Stakeholder Engagement
There was a lot of ambiguity to navigate in this project given its scope, changing business priorities and technical dependencies on other Salesforce products that are in development. With a design-led approach in our initial planning and discovery phases where we invested time and resources in primary research, analysis and co-design workshops, it really helped the team converge and align on the same priorities and move us forward in defining the MVP and ultimately, the North Star vision.
The experience vision also informed how we would plan for resources and work across 4 scrum teams aligned to our project pillars. I am particularly proud of the influence that design thinking frameworks and tools like journey maps, personas and co-creation workshops had on informing the path forward, especially with the positive feedback we received from our key project stakeholders.
As this project is still ongoing as of January 2023, I look forward to hearing more about its ongoing success and lasting impact that a design-led approach has.