Web App to Help Non Profits Accept Complex Donations
The Purpose of This Adventure
Working with Landon Young from Donate Equity, our goal was to research and begin creating a web app to help nonprofits accept donations of business equity. The sponsor of this project currently links donors and nonprofits personally and conducts all meetings himself as an entrepreneur. His vision is to transform his day-to-day work into an online process that educates, connects, and assists nonprofits with complex donations.
My Contribution
Role & responsibilities: Member of our design team, created screens for the landing page, FAQ page, and get started page. Led client meetings to provide updates on our work, spearheaded research and interviews with nonprofits, including medium size nonprofit Pancreatic Cancer Action Network.
Team: Grace Combs, Adelyn Wang, Aishwarya Gorantla, Jasmine Bui, Madison Loyd, Kelley McTyer, Santhoshi Ramanathan, Anandita Dixit, Syphax Raab
Duration: January 2024 - April 2024 (16 weeks)
Just like our team on the first day, you’re probably wondering what business equity donations are! This was an unfamiliar problem space for all of us, and learning the details of the donation process was necessary for us to understand where the pain points of nonprofit leaders were located in that process. We learned that the donor gives a part or whole of their business, so the process is more complex than just donating money. It involves more stakeholders, such as lawyers and evaluators, as the business’ value must be assessed and agreements must be handled by legal professionals.
Project Context
Exploration of the Space
Almost 100% nonprofits interviewed did not know what business equity donations were.
The People We Met
Our Sponsor: We thoroughly interviewed and re-interviewed our sponsor throughout the semester in order to fully understand how he currently interacts with nonprofits and the donation process. Including him in our design process was a major priority as we knew he was the donation expert and we were the design experts, so collaboration would only make our designs stronger and more informed. We accomplished this by meeting with him weekly to provide updates on our progress, ask questions, and receive feedback.
Our Interviewees: We also made networking connections and conducted interviews with multiple nonprofit leaders of small to medium sized organizations in order to figure out their experience levels with this more complex donation process. Our interviews helped us identify a lack of awareness and education surrounding business equity donations.
Insights
BED: (Business Equity Donation) A donation of part of, or an entire business, where appreciated interests are turned into charitable donations.
Interest: Despite having little knowledge of BEDs, nonprofits were open to learning more and expanding their lines of receiving.
Personnel: Attorneys, accountants, financial professionals, valuation experts, strategic partners, consultants, and donors.
Concerns: Nonprofits were concerned about having the necessary resources and staff to accept these complex donations.
This fact highlighted our problem: users won’t use a web app for a type of donation they know nothing about.
Our users’ need for information guided us to focus on the onboarding process, and clarified our goals to: educate, establish trust, and build confidence.
Before conducting interviews with nonprofits, we had to familiarize ourselves with the process of accepting complex business donations, and what those truly are. There was limited secondary research available online, so a majority of our research came from interviews with our sponsor, an attorney, and 6 nonprofits.
How We Saved the Day
After shifting our focus to the onboarding process, comparative analysis greatly helped us reach our goals of education, trust, and confidence building in the onboarding process. By looking at other sites that served our user group (nonprofits), we identified methods of sharing knowledge such as: videos, a dedicated information page, and FAQs. We implemented such methods into our designs alongside UX writing to build their trust in us.
In our project timeframe, we split our designing of screens into 3 categories: education, confidence/trust building, and the sign-up experience. Dividing up our screens helped remind us of the goals we needed to meet. It also helped our team divide and conquer so that we could provide a more fleshed-out onboarding experience for our sponsor and for future teams to pickup and work on.
Below are the screens I personally designed.
Our Impact
Our sponsor and nonprofits we interviewed for feedback were happy with how we identified our users’ need for information and used that need to focus on the onboarding process. Overall, we felt our impact most in the testing sessions with nonprofit leaders, who very openly expressed their excitement about the future of this web app. The potential to open up opportunities for nonprofits to accept more donations inspired me to continue working on this project as a summer intern after the semester ended.
Because we did not actually launch a final product, we acknowledge that we have no data to prove its success. However, if I were involved in the launch to track its success and impact, I would measure:
Growth in new sign-ups: to see if our site content inspires visitors to sign up.
Subscription renewal/what payment plan is chosen the most: to see if our content is worth payment from users.
Donation completion rate: to see if our content helps users receive donations.