Donor Communication Preferences

Collaborated with the one of the product designers on the design team at FreeWill to conduct evaluative research on the 'will' making product of the company, in order to improve donor (user) experiences.

Responsibilities: Tools Used:

Planning the research, Participant Recruitment, • User Interviews

Contextual Interviews, Affinity Mapping • Miro

• Confluence

Deliverables:

Recommendations on design changes based Timeline:

on the result, Presentation 3 weeks

Problem:

While creating a will with FreeWill, when a user decides to leave a bequest (a gift in a will or trust) to a nonprofit, they do not choose communication preferences until a separate screen at the end. Through the data of screen-time analysis conducted previously, it has been found that the screen towards the end is mostly overlooked as it is not setting proper expectations for donor outreach.

From the findings of previous research studies in regards to donor perspectives, we have learned that:
• Majority of donors do not expect outreach from partners.
• When donors expect outreach, they do not know when or how it will happen.
• It is not clear to donors about what details we share with partners upon their submission of a gift in the will.

This leads us to receiving more number of anonymized gifts which is a problem, as our partnered non-profits are not able to steward their donors. Stewardship is a key aspect for non-profits to promote recurring donations and fund raise better.

We believe that the partners will be more successful with stewardship if we set donor expectations by allowing them to opt-in to outreach and provide more granular communication preferences.

Objectives:

• Improving donor experience by asking their preference on how would they like to be communicated.
• Clearing donor's expectations on what information is shared and when it will be shared. Additionally, allowing them to choose medium of communication.
• Reach the goal to promote de-anonymized gifts.

Research Questions

• Do people understand what they are opting into? Does it meet their expectations?
• Are the current options the clearly interpretable? What changes can be made to those to make it more clear?
• What are long-term expectations for communication preferences, and does the outcome match their expectations?

Process:

Participant Recruitment:
Based on the nature of study, we reached out to participants from our database with a mix of types:
1. People who created a will using FreeWill in past 6 months.
2. People who left a gift while they created a will using FreeIll in past 6 months.

We did reach out to both these types of participants, but ended up recruiting 5 participants who did leave a gift when they created the will using FreeWill.

Possible Design Changes:
The product manager and product designer from the donor experience pod and I, brainstormed ideas which could possibly be implemented in order to address the objectives of the research. We conducted a sketching session to draw our ideas and collaborated to decide on the final ones to make a prototype which would be presented as a new version of the existing page.

Interviews:
30 minutes semi-moderated sessions were conducted with the recruited participants.
We presented two different versions of the same page and asked for the user reviews as they go through each of those.

Results and Next steps on design recommendations:

Below is an overview of the synthesis of our collected data.
Due to NDA, I would not be able to share the detailed results on the website. But I'd love to chat about the project in detail of you are interested. Please contact me through the links in the footnotes for more details.