Empowering women around the world through art & philanthropy
Last year in 2020, I collaborated with two talented friends, Unzi Park (back-end developer) and Grace Noh (UX designer in 2020, front-end developer in 2021), to build SheFunds in honor of International Women’s Month. SheFunds started as a website where you could donate to nonprofits supporting women and receive limited edition merchandise for your donations.
This year in 2021, we decided to re-launch SheFunds with new improvements to our product in order to broaden our impact, which I'll describe below.
Dec 2020—Present
Product Design Lead & Art Director: user experience and interface design, user research, prototyping, social media asset creation, art direction, project management as artist group leader
Why Did We Create SheFunds?
Our Solution in 2020
Our Impact in 2020
A few screenshots on how our donors received and sported their SheFunds merch in 2020.
Upon concluding our 2020 campaign, my teammates and I decided to take our learnings, analyze our shortcomings, and re-launch an improved version of SheFunds for International Women's Day in 2021.
We had several ambitions for year 2021, including redefining the vision, building a high-performing website that can permanently be up and running, increasing donation conversion, improving post-donation flow, and further developing relationships with nonprofits.
A retro on our 2020 campaigns
Out of all our ambitions, my personal main areas of focus were to:
To improve the donation conversion and experience from last year,
Given our desire to use SheFunds as a platform for discovering both nonprofits and artists,
A donation platform where donors can learn about a handful of impactful nonprofits supporting women, and discover a group of independent artists who have curated artwork specifically for a nonprofit of their choice. This artwork is gifted to the donors, and 100% of profits go to the nonprofit organizations.
We decided to feature only 5 nonprofits we felt extremely confident about this year. This allowed us to spend more time evaluating each nonprofit through our improved vetting process, which includes checking annual reports for impact, scrutinizing finances to make sure funding is directed back to programs, and confirming the nonprofit has a strong rapport and voice within their fields.
We also only included information that would help users feel compelled to donate, including personal stories, key statistics, and high-level summaries of the nonprofit's impact.
To leave no room for doubt, we emphasized where the money is going and how it's being used across key points in the user journey. We diversified the methods this information is presented to the user by utilizing direct copy, graphs, and helpful reminders when donating.
Given the buried donation flow was an issue last year, this year's platform clearly states donation steps in several points of the flow and up-levels the donate button as the main call to action.
This year, SheFunds partnered with 11 amazing independent artists around the nation to a) represent a variety of artistic talent, b) use this platform to help donors discover artists, and c) further incentivize donors to donate. These artists curated artwork specifically for our nonprofits, and this artwork is gifted to our donors. Ultimately, these artist partnerships have shaped our overall donation model and philosophy as an organization that hopes to be a home for good, honest work.
SheFunds just launched on International Women's Day (March 8th) and plans to run throughout March. Check it out at www.shefunds.live and stay tuned for updates on our impact this year :-)
Encountered a significant pain point in our UX flow
After I found that our users weren’t expecting a shopping experience from a donation site, I switched up the model to donation buckets, where $25 would equal to 1 artwork, $35 would be 2, and so on. Since each artwork is specific to a nonprofit, the donation page asked the user to choose a nonprofit first, and then their artwork. This meant that users could not select different artworks for different nonprofits, which turned out to be one of the major pain points during this 2021 campaign.
This is something we anticipated, but our team had agreed that the feature to donate to multiple nonprofits at once wouldn’t be in our MVP. Additionally, one design efficiency we decided to take this year due to time constraints on the engineering side was not adding a cart, which meant we were potentially further away from being able to implement the multi-add feature. However, I recognize that this is an important last step that could thoroughly affect the user experience, so I will be prioritizing this problem for our next campaign in 2022.
The artist community is... amazing
While collaborating with our 11 artists, I found our interactions and vision to be empowering. Not only did our artists create wonderful work for their chosen nonprofits, they also donated this work to SheFunds willingly. Several other artists also reached out to our team during March saying they wanted to contribute art to our initiative—and we are so thankful. Although this year we tried adding each artist's Venmo information upon checkout, I would like to work on finding a way for artists to receive compensation for next year, while still remaining true to our mission of donating 100% of profits to our nonprofits.
I have also personally learned so much from managing this group of artists, and will soon be asking for their feedback to improve my skills as the group leader.
