Affinity: All in one fundraiser app

My Role

In this project, my role was being a team member. I did a lot of interviews throughout the project, as well as creating the final high fidelity prototype. I voiced my opinion when needed, but allowed for the team leads to guide the project.

Project Overview

As a team of six students, we worked with Affinity, an idea for a product that helps university fundraisers foster and manage positive relationships with donors while discovering new leads and expanding their pool of donors. Affinity was originally designed as a mobile application integrated with the university’s customer relationship management (CRM) system that allowed for the creation and retrieval of contact reports and the scheduling of meetings.

Problem

We have been tasked with evaluating how university fundraisers operate under the current circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic. Previously, fundraisers would travel and meet in-person with donors to foster relationships, but this may have changed since the onset of the pandemic. Thus, we have been tasked with identifying whether or not the fundraising process has shifted due to the pandemic and to adapt to any changes as a result. We added on to the existing tool for university fundraisers to foster meaningful relationships despite any changes to their workflow due to the pandemic.

Explore the current workflow of university fundraisers
Identify pain points faced by fundraisers under their current working conditions
Reassess opportunities for a fundraising tool

Deliver a solution to allow university fundraisers to connect in a meaningfulway with donors while considering their pain points in regard to their workflow

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Team's work
expense Tracking feature

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My work
Calendar feature

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Teamwork: Interviews

Over the course of the semester, our team conducted over twenty interviews with University Fundraisers from a variety of universities including Purdue, Williams, and Trine. Our first round of interviews was to identify common issues within the field of university fundraising. We then took some of these key pain points that we found and conducted a second round of interviews to dive deeper into these major pain points. As a team, we affinity diagrammed our takeaways.

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After our team affinity diagrammed, we found four major pain points that university fundraisers face. These included: a maps feature, a Customer Relationship Management System that could be condensed into a phone application, an expense tracking feature, and a calendar feature.

Problem Statement + Finalized Scope

Given people's desire to stick with their existing communication apps, we moved away from making an application to centralize this communication process for fundraisers.

Another takeaway we obtained from interviews was that expense tracking and a centralized calendar were needed in this fundraising process due to the painful processes they currently have.

We decided to move in the direction of creating an app with both an expense tracking feature and a calendar feature to help centralize the fundraisers traveling process.

With this information in mind, our team finalized our problem statement:

“Major gift university fundraisers who travel to meet donors need a way to centralize their expense tracking and calendar processes during their business trips.”

After reviewing last semesters project, we found that they integrated a maps feature and a “Pocket CRM” (Customer Relationship Management System that was condensed into a phone application), so we decided to add on to the app by adding an expense tracking feature and a calendar that had their existing calendar integrated into it. We did this because the biggest pain point we found from fundraisers were that their process was not centralized, and these for key features all in one app would heavily centralize this process.

Teamwork: market analysis

After narrowing down to a problem scope, we began to do market analysis on expense tracking softwares and calendar applications. We did this in order to get some inspiration from already successful interfaces and implement some of these ideas into our design.

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Our team then started sketching on some of the takeaways we got from this market research. We took these sketches and created low fidelity mockups, tested with 7 users, and made the necessary iterations. We conducted concept testing instead of usability testing to ensure that the solution we created was valid, and it was, so we continued to making medium fidelity mockups (top of screen).

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Initial Sketching

Goal

To summarize the findings from our research and apply our knowledge to create an overall layout for higher fidelity prototypes.

Actionable Takeaways

Calendar

Monthly, weekly, and daily calendar views maintain consistency with the layout of the most commonly used calendars such as Outlook & Google Calendar, that we discovered through market research.

Expense Tracking

The integration between CRM and expense report allows for convenience. This way, the fundraisers do not have to go back and forth between multiple systems, and can process everything online.