paul stanton

Testing & Web Development for a New Nonprofit

Project Overview

Timeline: 15 weeks

The Southeast Valley Alliance is a non-profit organization based in Queen Creek, Arizona that provides community support to U.S. military veterans, active duty, their families, and first responders.

The GIT Creative Agency was asked to build them a website to fundraise for a new community center. I was assigned to the project as part of a two-person design team (my partner was the brilliant Mikey Amella).

The previous team from the Agency had created branding and initial prototypes of potential webpages. We performed UX research and testing of that branding/mockups and used the data to refine our prototypes. Then, after incorporating client feedback, we created the website in Squarespace and integrated it with Donorbox donation management software.

UX Research Process

Potential Donor Surveys

To get a better understanding of Southeast Valley Alliance’s target audience we a created a survey about donation habits and published it to several Queen Creek and east Valley Facebook groups targeted at our key demographics.

Personas

Using the data collected from our survey I created two personas collating the trends in the data.

User Testing

We next conducted user testing on our preliminary prototypes, focusing on the impressions and opinions users formed about the Southeast Valley Alliance from browsing through the prototyped website.

The fully interactive prototype was created in Figma. Our user tests were run through Useberry, which offers Figma integration.

Results of User Testing

While the information hierarchy and layout of the prototypes met with approval, users called the credibility of the organization into question. They didn’t gain an emotional connection with the company or a sense of trustworthiness through the current content. Our challenge was to redesign and add to our prototypes in order to make the Alliance more credible and personable.

UX Writing Process

One of the biggest flaws in the prototypes that our research uncovered was a lack of organizational storytelling. In particular the Donations page lacked any sort of “Missions Statement.” This left users without an emotional connection to the organization, which is key in getting them to donate.

I interviewed the board members about their vision for the company and researched what similar organizations wrote on their donation pages. I then used my notes from the interview and research to write copy for the donations page:

Your generosity makes
our community possible

Queen Creek has had an American Legion post in the community since 2005, but we haven’t had a facility or event center to be a central hub for that community.

We want to provide that hub. But we can’t do it without your help. This is a critical time for our organization.

Contributions from the community will help decide how many amenities our facility will be able to provide for our veterans and first responders.

Every contribution brings us closer to a home for the Queen Creek veteran and first responder community.

– https://www.southeastvalleyalliance.org/donate

Web Design Process

Updating Prototypes Based on UX Research

While all parts of the prototype received updates, I believe the most important updates were to the About and Donation pages.

The Donations page gained the mission’s statement I had written along with a breakdown of what the user could expect their donations to fund. The About page was reorganized to highlight the Alliance’s supporting organizations in order to increase their credibility.

Donation Software

I was tasked with researching donations management platforms to find one that offered terms and tools that matched the client’s specifications.

Since their organization was fairly new, it had to be a modular program that offered an initial low cost base package but was capable of additional functionality as the donor base grew (to prevent Alliance having to switch donation platforms as soon as they started growing).

I ended up settling on Donorbox due to its flat percentage-based initial plan for smaller organizations with options to upgrade at various levels, which would keep them price and feature competitive with similar software as the organization grew.

Final Design

After presenting our updated designs to the Alliance board, and adjusting it to meet their requests, we implemented the final design in Squarespace.

Southeast Valley Alliance Website

Reflection & Takeaways

Our main challenges in this project came from time and budget constraints on our UX Research. Conducting quality research in such a limited time frame was difficult. I’m happy with the insights we were able to glean and would be able to make a more realistic timeline assessment about such research in future.

I learned a lot about presenting in-progress work to clients on this project. At three different stages of the project we created presentations to share with the client our progress and get feedback on next steps and invoices. Deciding how to present things, what to push/fight for and what to compromise on is an art all unto its own. I think effective communication with clients is one of my better skills and one that I definitely had a chance to develop here.