SheFunds

Empowering women around the world through art & philanthropy

Overview

Last year in 2020, I collaborated with two talented friends, Unzi Park (developer) and Grace Noh (UX designer), 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.

Timeline

Dec 2020—Present

Role

Lead product & visual designer: user experience and interface design, user research, prototyping, art direction, social media graphic creation, project management as artist group leader

The Problem

To improve the donation experience from last year,

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 highly curated directory of a handful of impactful nonprofits that focuses on quality over quantity, makes the user's impact explicit, clearly states donation steps, and upgrades the incentive to donate through exceptional artwork.

Design Process

Context & Recap of Last Year

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:
    Today, people who wish to donate to causes supporting women cannot because they lack exposure to different types of women nonprofits
  2. Lack of information:
    People who are willing to donate lack information about issues women face today and the tangible impact that nonprofits have
  3. Lack of incentive:
    People who are capable of donating don’t see enough incentive to spend time and money donating nonprofits that support causes they care about.
If you're curious about our process, please read this medium article written by the brilliant Grace Noh.

Our Solution

With these problem statements in mind, we decided to create a platform that increases exposure to nonprofits, provides information to help donors make informed donations, and incentivizes donations through special rewards.

My Work Last Year

Last year, I was responsible for the creative direction of the brand and website, along with the graphic art for the merchandise, social media posts, and website images and animations.

Posters, stickers, and pins representing women's causes such as health, education, sexual violence, arts, and LGBTQA+ from last year.

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.

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

SheFunds in 2021

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:

  1. Revise and improve both the product and donation flow to drive more donations.

  2. Generate a refreshed visual brand to better embody our vision as a human and art-centered organization.

Problem Discovery

Methods:

  1. Analysis of user interviews graciously conducted by UX researcher Rannie Teodoro back in April 2020 with individuals who had visited our site. Objective of the research was to understand factors that discourage and encourage donations in the context of SheFunds' platform.
  2. Desk research on motivations behind donating to charities
  3. UX audit with heuristic analysis on last year's website
  4. Synthesis of findings to draw meta-insights

Moments capturing key insights & brainstorming

Meta-Insight 1:

Users were discouraged by the high cognitive load and information processing they had to do to choose a nonprofit to donate to.

Meta-Insight 2:

Users felt it was difficult to complete a donation because of usability friction in the donation flow.

Meta-Insight 3:

Users are more inclined to donate if it involves an emotional experience or personal connection to the cause.

Meta-Insight 4:

Users desire to have a better understanding of the tangible impacts of their donation.

With these meta-insights in mind,

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?

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

Design & Ideation

I began sketching and exploring different solutions with a couple ideas in mind:

  • Reducing our nonprofit count from 20 to 5 to avoid presenting too much information to users.
  • Explicitly stating the donation flow step by step at each screen of the process.
  • Adding personal stories & explicit reminders on how money is used.

Example wireframe screen on selecting a reward.

Conducted rapid testing sessions to narrow down directions,

Implemented feedback, and increased the fidelity of my designs.

User Testing & Insights

Methods:

1. One-on-one interviews with friends, the typical SheFunds donor.
2. Prototype audits by internal team with use of personas

Questions were focused on:

1. Motivations behind donating
2. Usability
3. Reflection on self-image

To understand our users' visceral, behavioral, and reflective levels of cognitive processing.

Insight 1:

The information available about each nonprofit is not compelling enough to encourage donations.

Insight 2:

Users want to know the explicit impact they're making with SheFunds.

Insight 3:

The shopping experience for artwork is in-cohesive with the expected donation experience.

Design System

Outcome

A curated directory of nonprofits that focuses on presenting quality over quantity,

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 emotional personal stories, statistics, and high-level summaries of the nonprofit's 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, I reached out to different 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. Our artists were willing to donate their time and talent to create artwork specific to a nonprofit of their choice, in the form of a print or sticker. 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.

Our Impact

Coming Soon

SheFunds just launched on International Women's Day (March 8th) and plans to run throughout April. Check it out at www.shefunds.live and stay tuned for updates on our impact this year :-)