Problem

One of the best things I have done for my personal growth was volunteering at a nonprofit. I have learned so much and I feel like it has made me a better person. I wanted to solve a problem space for my favorite nonprofit charity: water. Since charity: water is global nonprofit funding thousands of water projects and serving millions of people with many donors and volunteers. I came across a design challenge where the scope was to create a responsive site that can view this kind of data at a glance while sending a thank you note to their donors.

Since I have two years' worth of experience in designing and maintaining dashboards, I figured building a responsive dashboard for charity: water was in my wheelhouse.

Solution

I built a responsive dashboard that can view water projects, donors, and donations while having the capability of sending a thank you note to donors using research and one on one meetings with a charity: water representative.

Role

UX Designer

UX Researcher

Role

Figma

Notion

Otter.AI

Timeline

5 Weeks

Secondary Research

The nonprofit sector is a new space for me. I knew that I needed to cover all of my bases when it comes to research. I volunteer for a nonprofit, so I knew that was a good starting point to ask people how they manage their data and understand their overall operations. I spoke with four representatives from different nonprofits (including one from charity: water) to help me understand the space, how they operate, and what tools they use to track their donations and volunteers.

Speaking with Subject Matter Experts (SME Interviews) & Representative from charity: water

In order to understand how nonprofits operate, I needed to ask the right people how this specific industry works and what data management tools are used.

Here are some key insights from the SME interviews:

• Success is dependent on being fully transparent with where money is dedicated (administrative costs and the actual charity donations) with publicly available documentation to prove it.
• Success is also dependent on the visual appeal and branding of the charity. There are hundreds of charitable organizations, creating a minimalistic brand identity that is also recognizable helps you stand out among donors of all ages.
• Success is dependent on having a clear mission and vision. It also needs to be sustainable (overhead money to take care of administrative costs and money to fund actual programs).
• A beautiful and simple way to navigate through a website to donate also plays a large success in a charity's longevity while keeping it consistent with the brand's identity.
• Being transparent with your business model from the get-go is imperative. For example, the 100% business model (a business model where 100% of donations go to the cause) has its downfalls (private donors covering the administrative cause can potentially sway where a charity puts money in their projects), but if a charitable organization is transparent with their business while mastering the art of visual rhetoric such as minimal design, feel-good stories, brand identity, "standout" branding, displaying abstract ways of a design into real life (for example, charity: water's brand is a yellow water jug, they also display this in real life photos) then you are almost guaranteed to continue to be a successful organization.
• Subscription-based services have been on the rise, and charitable organizations have implemented this so they can let donors feel like they are constantly feeling like they are part of the feel-good story.
• Culture and integrity. To keep a charitable organization honest and healthy, the administrative side that drives the organization is also imperative. The staff needs to stay healthy within for long-term success and help drive the vision of the organization. When you have a group of noble and passionate staff, you make it difficult for other charitable organizations to compete with you for donor dollars.

Competitive Analyses

Since a majority of nonprofits use spreadsheet-like software (no dashboard available) to track internal information, business intelligence dashboards (requiring an application to be installed), and CRM tools (also requiring an actual application to be installed with heavier setup) I went ahead and compared a few of these products.

My competitive analyses findings include:

• None of the spreadsheet products can transform data into dynamic actionable insights.
• Some nonprofits use CRM tools (a relational database in which you can store data) and can create dashboards from that specific tool, but you are limited within the product's framework.
• Dashboard products (like Tableau and PowerBI) require an application to be installed to access and view analytics.

The results motivated me to:

• Focus on using interviews to learn about what key insights they want to see at a glance.
• Use the interviews to help drive the design and architecture of a web-based dashboard.