Work Project
Donor Profiles - CRM Feature
Company introduccion
The problem at hand
Users didn't have enough valuable donor information within the platform to make key decisions
These users rely on 3rd-party integrations of other CRMs to transfer the data they need but they don’t want to go through the hassle of managing different platforms and going back and forth between them. There’s not enough CRM-like functionality to help them engage more with their donors from within the platform to save them time and effort.
Identified user segments
Mid-sized organizations
This specific user segment was in need of a new way to discover their donors motivations and behaviour for better targeting but without throwing their “budget” out of the window. Often not a 3dr-party CRM user.
Large to enterprise organizations
This specific user segment was in need of more advanced data features including advanced tracking and advanced reporting of donors and donations within the platform. They can be familiar with other CRMs already.
Paint points we discovered
Lack of essential donor information
Without enough information, it’s difficult for these users to understand essential donor behaviour that leads to higher, more frequent donations
Management and maintenance of multiple platforms
These users rely on 3rd-party integrations to other CRM platforms to transfer the data they need but they don’t want to go through the hassle of managing multiple platforms and going back and forth between them
High learning curve to setup other CRMs
Integrating with 3rd party tools to facilitate this need requires allocation of resources to learn a new platform and configure integrations correctly, when they would rather have one intuitive platform to do it all (or most of it, at least)
Limited budget
Most Non-profit organizations usually rely on funding from donors and don’t necessarily have the biggest budgets to setup an ecosystem of platforms to do their business with. Our users want a cost-effective approach to donor relationship management
The basic functionality offered at the moment
A very basic table of donors
Users could only see names, emails and total donations. All other important data was missing.
Very basic donation details
Donation data could only be seen per transaction. Users were forced to see each transaction individually to gain somewhat useful insights from the donors.
Identifing third-party CRMs tools normally used by RallyUp power-users to complement donor data
Most of which are very complex products for setting them up as integrations and their interfaces are not for everyone
Some examples we used to get familiar with our users' current environments and discover opportunities
Defining learnings and objectives
After further discussion and consolidating the problem, we've moved on to define the key pieces of the requirements
The user goal
To ease the process of engaging with donors at the first touch-points in the non-profit<-->donor, relationship-building journey
How might we...
...help our users to understand their donors and their behaviour with essential donor data and relationship-boosting tools in an intuitive and simplified way that’s added to a platform they already are familiar with so they can increase their donations and donor base for their fundraisers?
What's in it for us? - The biz point of view
Summary of the key OKRs. We wanted to make sure we had a clear goal to keep our growth going and, by offering a more dynamic set of donor data with reduced effort, we were envisioning an increase in retention and platform usage overall which would lead to revenue increase by the end of the year.
Non-profits increase donations and reduce costs by using RU with new engagement tools
Satisfied, returning customers
Increase in user retention, NPS and LTV (revenue)
Highlighting some of the main user stories and JTBDs that needed to be covered to achieve user satisfaction
Epic
As a non-profit, I want to learn about who our donors are and understand their giving behaviour so that I have a clear image of when and how to engage with them and what incentivize them to give more and more often to our causes.
Break down of key task-based user stories
As a non-profit, I want to monitor the quantity and type of donors on my fundraisers so that we can analyze engagement and success of our initiatives.
As a non-profit, I want to easily access donor information so that we can reach them at the best time based on our content strategy.
As a non-profit, I want to be able to categorize our donor base so that we can segment and target a specific donor base for a more personalized marketing implementation.
As a non-profit, I want to monitor and track donor activity so that we can create and promote the right fundraisers they care about at the right time.
The Main Challenge
Provided that our platform already had limited basic information and limited scalability, we needed to work out a solution that would allow for a more dynamic set of data by adding new behavioural and interaction donor information that could be better organized and easily accessible and digestible.
CURRENT AVAILABLE DATA
Personal & Contact information
NEW DATA SET
Behavioural & Interaction information
The principles we defined that would allow us to reach the goals set
Intuitive UI
Provide an intuitive space to store and display essential donor behaviour information, donation activity and key communications tracking with relationship-boosting built-in tools within the right context that’s easily accessible at any given time
Guidance in context
Implement an intuitive guided walk-through for first time users of the feature. Since it’s a feature within a familiar platform for mostly existing users, it would be rather simple by highlighting only what’s new to them making the learning experience a breeze
Powerful enough, but flexible
Deploy an enough powerful CRM-like feature that won’t require the use of 3rd party integrations to achieve the same goal for the most part, while still providing the flexibility of integrations for those advanced users who need a complementary, full-fledged CRM platform
Shaping the solution
We ended up experimenting on two features for our users: a Revamped Donor Database, and the Donor Profiles
1. Revamped Donor Database
Since we wanted to provide an end-to-end intuitive experience for our users to access their donor data, we decided to update the old donor database for a more consistent experience and scalable design approach (this design language was later applied to the rest of the databases throughout the platform). With this update we introduced a few new elements for easier navigation, narrowing down needed data, and easy to reach common actions such as bulk emailing supporters.
2. Donor Profiles
The core feature we would offer to our users. It would enable new functionality that was non-existent before alongside more donor information available which would help organizations understand better and engage more with their community from a single platform. No more headaches.
The Outcome
A revamped Donor Database
After various explorations, we achieved a good balance between information architecture and intuitiveness in the UI. Although we added significantly more information to the page, it was very digestible and easy to find whatever the user was looking for, even highlighting essential data that wasn't accessible before.
Before
After
The new Donor Profiles
Fully focusing on the principles we defined, we were happy to find a way to display the new behavioural information alongside the basic personal data that's intuitive and flexible enough without breaking the experience. The overlay side panel solution would allow users to access this information even from other pages, with one single click and without disrupting their current flow.
Before
After
A closer look at the interactions
Desktop
Mobile
Additional, important considerations we had to keep in mind to achieve the best results
From our current platform
Not great navigation
Current donor table and donations table are separate pages. This means that, to see more information about a certain donor, the user is taken to a different page and need to navigate back and forth between them. Not good. All donor info should live in the same space.
Mixed flows
Current donations table page is used in a filtered state when requesting more data from a certain donor. It’s also used as the global donations data base for a whole fundraiser. This is not ideal for clean navigation so the donor should have it’s own set of data (own space).
Information architecture could be better
Donation details can only be seen on the global donations data base but not on the donor data base. We will need a way to consolidate this data under one place for easy access and navigation.
Constrained, not scalable design
Our current data base design won’t allow for more rich data without starting to get messy. We will need to revisit current components and revamp the data base designs for scalability.
From our users
Not very tech savvy
Most of our users are not tech savvy. They can get confused or lost with the most basic of patterns on a SaaS platform. We need an interface friendly and obvious enough but robust enough for users to benefit from the new feature but without overwhelming them.
Older demographic
Most charity organizations admins and managers on our user base are from the Gen X to Boomers generation (~40-65) with a traditional mindset about tech, with exceptions of course. New, modern interaction patterns might be too complicated to understand for fast adoption. Ideally, we will try to keep the patterns they’re familiar with already.
Devices
We understand that most of our users don’t have access to powerful devices so we need to keep in mind performance and speed over a fancy user interface.
Interesting fact...
Despite being a desktop-focused platform due to its complexity, our user base also rely on their mobile devices to perform complex tasks and monitor their fundraisers on certain occasions. This means that we needed to make sure this new feature performs very well and is responsive and intuitive on their smartphones as well through our webapp.
And... We delivered
We were able to shape this feature into something of very high value for our targeted users that could be leveraged responsively, no matter where they are or what device they're using at any given time, allowing them to save time, reduce costs, and, most importantly, increase donations (reach their goals easier).
Responsive Donor Database 2.0
Responsive Donor Profiles
Performance after launch
Some of the main positive highlights that told us it was worth the effort and the right decision.
Increase in premium subcribers (MRR)
Our BizDev folks decided that this highly anticipated and requested feature would be one of the main incentives for our premium subscription package which led to more users subscribing
Increase in average donations received
Now that organizations had more ways to understand their donors, they were able to put a better strategy in place that led to more often, higher donations from our users donor base
Increase in usage of other premium features
Since this feature was bundled with other amazing features (like full-fledged email marketing capabilities, for instance), users were able to try and leverage these tools for better fundraisers overall
Lots of kudos to our team
Our customer success team is one of the best (if not the best) in the market and our users appreciate that. And when user are happy, they let us know. We received a lot of kudos after launch
Next steps for us
Despite being a successful launch, there were things we had to sacrifice to allow for a faster, more efficient initial release. We know this is important for our power-users, so we want to keep developing this feature into something great that can compete directly with the big names in the CRM industry. These are some of the new additions and optimizations we plan to add to the feature next:
Combine donor profiles with our full email marketing capabilities
The email capabilities of the shipped feature are pretty basic. You target a donor, open its profile, send an email (or select multiple and send a bulk email). We want to provide more advanced, drip email marketing functionality on the next iterations
Add more CRM-like essential features for a all-in-one-place experience
Full-fledged CRMs have the advantage of offering very specific features that are used by highly-effective teams. We want to bring some of those features to our platform to provide the one platform to do it (mostly) all
Do more research to discover new opportunities to improve upon
Unfortunately, we didn’t have the budget nor the time for a full research cycle. We're hoping that next time we will invest more in this phase to uncover new opportunities of improvement that will bring our users even more excitement towards this amazing feature
*These initiatives were moved to future phases due to technical and financial constrains
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