SheFunds

Empowering women around the world through art & philanthropy

Overview

SheFunds is a website where you can donate to nonprofits supporting women and receive beautiful artwork in return. This project was created in collaboration with two talented friends, Unzi Park (back-end developer) and Grace Noh (UX designer in 2020, front-end developer in 2021), in honor of International Women's Day and Women's History Month.

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.

Timeline

Dec 2020—April 2021

Role

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

Live Website
Desktop Prototype

Context & Recap of 2020

Why Did We Create SheFunds?

Back in 2020, SheFunds started with a simple mission to help existing nonprofits that support women. We had three main reasons why:
  1. Lack of exposure
  2. Lack of information
  3. Lack of incentive
If you're curious about our process last year, please read this medium article written by the brilliant Grace Noh.

A quick view of last year's website

Our Impact in 2020

With the tremendous amount of support from our donors in 2020, together we:
  • Raised $2,556 USD, of which 100% of profits went directly to the nonprofits in our directory
  • Distributed merch to 62 donors as a thank you for their donation
  • Donated to 16 different nonprofits supporting women.
For full transparency, please view our 2020 records. 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.

A few screenshots on how our donors received and sported their SheFunds merch in 2020.

The Problem (2021 edition)

To improve the donation conversion and experience from 2020,

How might we reduce the cognitive load for users to donate easily, yet provide enough information about the nonprofits they're donating to? What type of information is essential?

Given our desire to use SheFunds as a platform for discovering both nonprofits and artists,

How might we frame our rewards in our donation flow to deliver a meaningful donating experience?

The Solution

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.

View Design Process đź”’

SheFunds is a curated directory of nonprofits that focuses on presenting quality over quantity,

We featured only 5 nonprofits we felt extremely confident about this year, which allowed us to spend more time evaluating each nonprofit through our vetting process. We also carefully curated information that would help users feel compelled to donate, including personal stories, key stats, and high-level summaries of impact.

Makes the user's impact explicit prior to and during the donation step,

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.

Up-levels donation steps,

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.

And upgrades the incentive to donate through exceptional artwork.

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 was gifted to our donors.

Design System

Artwork Created by Our Artists

Social Media Assets

Our Impact

After launching our site on March 8th, 2021 and over the course of 24 days, together we:

  • Raised $4,090 USD, of which 100% of profits went directly to the nonprofits in our directory
  • Distributed artwork to 132 donors (+113%) as a thank you for their donation
  • Donated to 5 nonprofits supporting women.
  • Was re-shared by 4 out of 5 nonprofits on social media.

Reflections

Encountered a significant pain point in our UX flow

Throughout our campaign, I found that one of the major pain points for our donors was that they could not select different artworks for different nonprofits. Although this was something we had anticipated and de-prioritized due to time constraints, I hope to prioritize this problem for our next campaign in 2022.
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The artist community is... amazing

While collaborating with our 11 artists, I found our interactions and vision to be empowering, and have personally learned so much on how to communicate better as the group leader. Several other artists around the web also reached out to our team during March saying they wanted to contribute art to our initiative—and we are so thankful.

Print designed by Regina La O