Compassionate Crowdfunding

ABOUT YOUCARING

YouCaring’s mission is to ensure that no one faces hardship alone, by providing a compassionate crowdfunding platform that empowers people to help others overcome hardship by raising money for a variety of humanitarian causes.  Over $450 million has been raised on YouCaring's platform since it's launch in 2011, with zero fees charged on funds raised.

PROJECT CHALLENGE

While YouCaring's main responsive web app is great for donors to browse and contribute to campaigns, Campaign Organizers currently do not have an easy way to engage with donors, post campaign updates, and promote their campaigns via text, email, or social media.  The scope of the project involved designing a new iOS app for campaign organizers to help them share their fundraiser on social media channels, edit and post fundraiser updates, manage their account information, and easily see tips for maximizing the success of their fundraiser. 

SUMMARY

Worked on a team to design a full native iOS app from scratch for campaign organizers to easily share, update, and track their fundraisers.

Process

RESEARCH

Researched and demoed YouCaring's existing responsive web app as well as the apps of several competitors in the crowdfunding space, including GoFundMe, Generosity, Razoo, GiveForward, Tilt, Causes, Indiegogo, and Kickstarter to learn how competing apps addressed common functionality and to get inspiration.

Coducted usability tests on GoFundMe's iOS app with people who have organized at least 1 campaign on YouCaring or a competitor's platform to learn more about users' expectations, thoughts, and feelings around starting and promoting a crowdfunding campaign. 

Some main insights:

1.  Campaign organizers often worry about spamming their network.  We wanted to find a way to make communication between organizers and donors more personal and meaningful, which we did through our Supporters tab, allowing organizers to send custom and private messages to individual and custom groups of donors and sorting donors by "All" and "Need to be Thanked" (see iterations below).

2.  Organizers are often unsure how to maintain momentum and maximize donations to their campaign.  We addressed this frustration by creating a Tip Coach section included in the Fundraiser tab (see iterations below), to provide personalized recommendations about promotion strategies and next steps, to encourage sharing, campaign updates, and engagement with donors.

ITERATION

Develop a preliminary sense of the app's information architecture and lo fidelity wireframes:

YouCaring's existing brand and style principles (see pic below from YouCaring's main web app) were used in this design.  Since YouCaring's red color (#E23D49) is used mostly for Donate actions, this color association was preserved for users by not utilizing it in this organizer-focused app, instead using the other brand colors of blue and purple.

Summary

YouCaring's engineering team was implementing this organizer-focused iOS app, expected to be released in mid-2018, but YouCaring was acquired by GoFundMe.