Donor Panel Project

Problem

In the constant need of conducting discovery and UX research at FreeWill, the user recruitment process can be cumbersome, considering the niche audience that we are targeting to conduct our studies with.
Every time that a team talks to donors (users) for feedback, a new recruitment process is started – which can take up to 2 weeks or more to complete. While we can work with existing recruitment platforms or recruiters, these come at a higher cost and can sometimes provide less qualified participants. The time to recruit needs to be shortened, the quality of participants held at a high standard, all while ideally keeping the cost to recruit low.

Additionally, in many cases, 'donors' as a generic user base is too unspecific for our studies. Certain studies have specific criteria in mind, like donors who give certain amounts, who give to certain causes, who leave a planned gift, who give other non-cash assets, or have other characteristics.
Thus, we have to be strategic and mindful about reaching out to only those donors who want to participate, and who have not participated recently.

Approach to Solving

Creating a donor panel where the UXR team can look ahead to participants who have been agreed to participate, are genuine and are a good fit for a given research project.
Thus, having participant list that has different characteristics and have filled the interest form to participate in a survey in near future.

Motivation

1. Having a set of research participants already identified, screened, and ready to go makes it easy to do qualitative research more quickly and with greater frequency.
2. You save a lot of time on the ops side of things, because the administrative and logistical work of recruiting the right people is already done.
3. Allows you to do iterative research. The ability to retest concepts at various stages with the original group of users can provide critical insights as you refine your ideas and execution.

Process

Understanding the requirements and choosing the focus areas - Considering the future research can be focussed on any of parts of our products, we decided to reach out to the audience from all these areas - planned gift, stock donation, crypto donation and qualified charitable distributions.

Discussing it with the expert team members of the selected focus area on what information would be required.

Deciding on the audience to reach out:
a. Planned gift - People who created a will from January 1st, 2022.
b. Stock Donation - People who made a donation through stocks portal from January 2022.
c. Crypto Donation - People who made a donation through Crypto for Charity from January 2022.
d. Qualified Charitable Distributions - No specific target audience as QCDs only come through the partner portal.

Exporting the data from Looker with apt filters and adding those to the contact list of SendGrid.

Making a questionnaire asking about the recency, amount and frequency of each of the above mentioned focused areas, in addition to any special questions of related to that type of donation. (Tool used: SurveyMonkey)

Drafting an effective email in order to have a maximum reach to the audience. Co-ordinating with marketing team and aligning it with the standards. Conducting A/B test with different formats of email.

Sending out the email with the survey link.

Collecting and observing the data.

Due to NDA, I would not be able to share the results and the insightful points found out of this study on this webpage, but I'd love to chat about it over a call. Please contact me through the contact details in the footer to know more about the project.

Next Steps

• Trying out the facebook ads for further recruitment as well as exploring other ways of advertising, for eg: podcast ads, Reddit, Linkedin etc.
• Setting up a standardized process to provide access to this panel for the team, as there has to be a track of who has been reached out and who hasn’t. (Completed this during my internship)
• Also, trying to merge it with the previous data that has been collected and filtering out the common ones.