Affinity
Goal of the Project
This was a class project as part of the Purdue UX Experience Studio for Spring 2020, sponsored by GivingLeads, The original prompt that we received for this project was to design something to help non-profits acquire leads of potential donors to help fund their businesses.
However, over the course of the project, the research we did determined that there was no real need for such a design, and we had to pivot by identifying a problem by ourselves to then focus on.
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Final Prompt That We Focused On :
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Designing a new tool to help university donation/development officers dealing with major gifts to maintain relationships with their large donors, and discover potential new ones.
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Timeline: 16 weeks (January 2020 - May 2020)
Contribution
Championing primary research (interview process) and creation of wireframes. Acted as a de-facto co-lead of our team consisting of freshmen alongside my actual co-leads).
Design Solution
Affinity is a cloud-based, database tool integrated with the university’s CRM that allows for efficient creation and retrieval of contact reports as well as flexible meeting scheduling.
It allows university development officers to:
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Easily organize trips to meet with their major donors
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Quickly record information learned during their meetings
Donations
Why alumni donate/don't donate
Alumni Connections
Frequency of contact
Statistics
Types of donations given
Research
Secondary Research (Original Prompt)
Topics
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How donations are allocated across the university
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Strategies universities employ to engage alumni to ultimately solicit donations
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Types of donations given to universities (e.g., money, real estate, etc.)
Based on our findings, we created an affinity diagram to identify groupings.
Improvements
Ways to improve engagement
Money Purpose
How funds are allocated
Strategies
Contact new/recurring donors
"How do officers identify and reach out to donors in the first place?"
To address the above question when we were still exploring our original prompt, we conducted a competitive analysis on several existing CRMs: Pitchbook, Salesforce, Zoho and Monday.com
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The purpose of this was for the team to identify things that were useful, and things that could be modified to fit our context.
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Interviews (Round One)
For this first round of interviews, we had certain goals in mind.
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Learn the roles and workflow of donation officers
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Discover how officers identify and reach out to generous donors (products / services they use, the process of engaging wealthier alumni, etc.)
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Find out how these donation officers communicate with donors
We conducted interviews with four people working as directors of prospect management or giving from different universities.
The biggest takeaway we gathered was that it was not donation offices, but rather development offices that were most concerned with major gifts.
Interviews (Round Two)
Based on this key takeaway that we were able to gather during the first round, we created a new protocol to understand the workflow of development officers in universities. During this round, we spoke to 8 people over video call, or in person.
Development officers spend more than half their time traveling to meet with donors (12-15 / month)
Information about donors is kept in a portfolio which is maintained on a regular basis
Officers have ample resources / tools to discover new leads
Through this, we were also able to identify pain points in their process :
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Outdated UI of their current CRM tool
Management of information on 100+ donors
Extracting data from the CRM is tedious
Unexpected travel changes
This led us to rescope from the original prompt by :
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Creating a research report to record all the key takeaways that could lead us to a new problem statement
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Creating a spreadsheet to list the pain points of all our interviewees as well as potential solutions
Spreadsheet we used to ideate and identify potential new problem statements
New Scope
In order to successfully acquire large donations for a university, development officers must build lasting relationships and foster trust with their donors in their portfolio through consistent and close communication. This is done through their in-person visits.​
Our Solution: For University Major Gifts / Development Officers who need a way to easily access and record important information about their donors, Affinity is a cloud-based, database tool integrated with the university's CRM that allows for the efficient creation and retrieval of contact reports as well as flexible meeting scheduling.
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Application Flow
In order to guide our wireframing, we devised an application flow to determine the screens we would need to make and specify the features within those screens.
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The map in the second image consisted of tabs or pages apart from the main interconnected functions that we had too design as part of the overall experience.
After making an initial set of wireframes, we conducted unstructured testing sessions with several development officers over Zoom, since we had shifted to remote means as a result of the pandemic halfway through the semester.
While they were given tasks to test the usability of the designs, the main thing we were looking for was a concept check to see if users were able to understand the purpose of the application and its different features.
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Based on the feedback we then received, we proceeded to make iterations to this first set of wireframes to finalize our designs.
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Final Designs - Wireframes
MAIN SCREEN
NEW CONTACT
REPORT
These screens are steps by which one can add a contact report. In the above examples, the user can choose to assign a donor for which the report is being taken from their contact list. Then, they can enter the notes for that particular meeting, and add tags as well to enable search by keywords later on if they wish to create categories for their notes and contacts. The user can also place the donor in the phase of the donation cycle that they are in depending on the progress.
SCHEDULE TRIP
This screen enables users to schedule/make note of trips where they might plan to meet several donors in a city. Officers can write down specific details - the date range and location, and add the meeting information of all the individual donors that they will be visiting over the course of their trip, and share or export the trip details as well.
MAP
Officers can search for the donors in a city in the event that they plan to visit, and directly choose to contact them or schedule a trip in that city based on how long it has been since their last correspondence.
DONOR PROFILE
This screen is a profile of a donor from the development officer's portfolio. It shows their personal details, career and giving summary, as well as an archive of all the contact reports that the officer has made for that particular donor.
CRM SYNC
These screens explore synchronization of the application to the CRM that the officer is using, which allows them to import and export contacts, schedules and notes based on different filters.
ADDITIONAL
SCREENS
This was a very interesting project to work on, and quite challenging as well. Due to the amount of research that my team did, primarily through extensive interviews, it gave me an opportunity to reach out to and speak with a lot of interesting people that provided great insight into a topic that we did not know much about.
We were lucky to have a very supportive sponsor as well, so the process was quite smooth overall. My team had a great dynamic which definitely contributed to a good working environment despite the fact that we had to switch to remote learning abruptly halfway through the semester.
Being a de-facto co-lead definitely provided me with a good base to develop my leadership skills, which I am now putting into effect as the lead of my project this Fall 2020.
