48-hour Hackathon | Girls in Tech – Hacking for Humanity 2023
Overview
At the 2023 Girls in Tech Hackathon, I led the design and development of donor engagement features for NALAM, a small nonprofit with a mission to empowers vulnerable girls in South India. With limited time and resources, we aimed to create scalable experiences that would enhance donor retention and operational efficiency through automation and personalized impact storytelling.
My Role
UX Designer and de facto PM, teamed with with 1 UX Designer and 2 Developers
The Challenge
NALAM currently struggles to build meaningful long-term engagement with their donors due to inefficient operational processes. These challenges lead to limited communication, difficulty demonstrating impact, and increased administrative burden on their volunteer team, potentially hindering donor retention and future growth.
Pain Points
Through stakeholder interviews, we learnt that the heart of NALAM's issue lay in nurturing strong donor relationships. With majority of donor communications handled offline by two volunteers, the organization struggled to provide personalized updates and demonstrate impact effectively. This manual approach created bottlenecks, hindered donor retention and limited their outreach primarily to their German base.
Key findings included:
Donors lack clear insight into the tangible impact of their contributions.
Limited online presence restricted their ability to connect with potential donors outside of their German base.
The manual handling of donor communications and administrative tasks placed a heavy burden on limited volunteer resources.
To mitigate privacy concerns for the girls they support (including but not limited to: discrimination, abuse, forced labor), NALAM currently handles sponsorship communication offline once donor relationship is established.
Identify Experience Gaps
To put ourselves in the donor's shoes, we examined NALAM's existing process and mapped out donor's end-to-end experience from start to finish.
Current Donor User Flow
Experience Gaps
Donors exit too early
After making a donation, user exits the site with no opportunity for deeper engagement.
Delayed engagement after donation
Sponsorship related communication is handled manually by volunteers and starts only after the donor is paired with an orphan, which may take time.
Unable to manage donations
Donors are unable to manage their current sponsorships or see their past donation history.
Lack of follow-up for non-donors
If a user chooses not to donate during current visit, the flow ends with no effort to re-engage them in the future.
Ideation
To address the challenge of enhancing donor engagement and relieving administrative burden for NALAM, our team conducted a brainstorming session to generate a wide range of ideas and possible solutions that could be further evaluated and prioritized.
How might we empower NALAM to cultivate meaningful engagement with donors and streamline operations?
Ideation
Organization
Prioritization
We leveraged the MoSCoW Prioritization framework to define our core features. Prior to this analysis, our team met with NALAM's founder to ensure alignment on objectives and prioritization factors. This crucial step allowed us to concentrate on identifying high-impact and feasible solutions within our limited timeframe.
Must Have: Donor dashboard with impact visualization
This feature directly addresses the critical pain point of donors lacking clear insight into their impact. By providing a real-time view of how their contributions are making a difference and tying it to the larger fundraising goals, we aim to increase transparency, build trust, and foster stronger donor engagement. This could include visual representations of the number of orphan girls supported, progress towards organizational goals, and specific examples of the impact achieved through their generosity. This feature directly aligns with a key objective identified in our discussions with NALAM's founder and is considered essential for the initial success and adoption of the platform.
Should Have: Admin task automation
Implementing tools to automate repetitive administrative tasks, such as generating standardized donation reports, and streamlining the process for acknowledging donations, would significantly reduce the burden on NALAM's limited volunteer resources. This would free up their time to focus on more strategic initiatives like personalized donor outreach and deeper engagement activities. While not directly a donor-facing feature of the MVP, improving operational efficiency is a high priority for NALAM's sustainability and long-term growth, making this a valuable "Should Have" for the initial phases to ensure the platform can be effectively managed.
Could Have: Orphan card with call to action
This feature aims to foster continuous engagement and drive opportunities for further support. By presenting donors with anonymized profiles of the girls benefiting from this program, we can create a more personal connection to the platform. This design offers an immediate follow-up to the positive reinforcement of the (Must Have) impact visualization, nurturing a stronger sense of connection and potentially driving additional donations by showcasing the ongoing needs and the real individuals being helped. We consider this a "nice-to-have" feature to ensure the full impact loop is established effectively.
Won’t Have (yet): Community building functionalities
While fostering a sense of community among donors could be valuable for long-term engagement and support, we have decided to defer the development of specific community-building functionalities (e.g., a donor forum) for the initial MVP. Our primary focus is on addressing the immediate needs of impact transparency and laying a solid foundation for individual donor engagement. Community features require careful planning, moderation, and technical implementation, and will be considered for integration in future phases after the core platform is well-established and user feedback is gathered.
Minimum Viable Product
Our MVP focuses on empowering NALAM donors by providing a self-service Donor Dashboard that directly addresses the need for greater transparency and engagement. We prioritized features that enable donors to easily understand their impact, connect with the organization's mission, and share their support with their networks.
Dashboard Home features a personalized greeting and clearly displaying the organization's overall fundraising goals and donor's individual donation milestones. This design fosters a sense of connection and shared purpose by providing personalized insights and a clear view of donor impact.
Impact Meter provides real-time visualization of how the donor's contributions directly translate into tangible impact. This design addresses the desire for transparency and demonstrates the value of their generosity by visualizing the direct results of their donations.
Donor-Service Center provides donors with a self-service portal to manage their past supports and access key information, such as view donation history and download written acknowledgement letter for tax purposes.
Orphan Card with CTA facilitates continuous giving by offering a conversion-driven, streamlined and accessible donation journey to deepen their engagement, without leaving donor dashboard.
Shareable Content Generation enables donors to easily share their impact stories with anonymized social media templates. This design leverages the power of social influence to drive awareness and encourage broaden support.
Demo
By the end of the hackathon, we successfully delivered:
Validated product concept that aligned with stakeholder needs
Working prototype of the dashboard with real-time components
Impacts
Strategic Alignment
This project helped NALAM shift from ad-hoc donor communication to a vision for long-term digital engagement.
Lifetime Value
By personalizing the donor journey, we opened doors to recurring donations and organic advocacy through social media integration.
Scalability
The automation framework we outlined in future iterations could potentially reduce 80% of admin effort.
What I Learned about Product Strategy
Clarity unlocks speed
A well-defined problem statement and MVP scope enabled us to aligned and move quickly and with purpose.
Prioritization is a product superpower
Focusing on what matters most helped us deliver value early and avoid getting stuck in feature creep.
Alignment beats consensus
In my dual role as a UX Designer and de facto Product Manager, I focused on uniting design and engineering around outcomes instead of just agreements, so we could move fast with little friction.