Sound Up Mobile App Case Study

A local Minneapolis charity wanted to streamline the donation process. Bands performed to raise money for families in crisis. A mobile-first fundraising app idea designed for bands and made for donors with key features to increase donations for more people in need.

Role

  • Research and competitive analysis

  • Strategy development, personas and journey maps

  • Building low fidelity mockups with priority guides

  • Generating high fidelity prototypes to test features

  • Creating design assets for multichannel distribution

Tools

  • Google Forms, Documents, Sheets & Slides for content strategies, survey distribution and results, and presentations for final design refinements

  • Adobe Creative Suite for design, branding and mockups

  • Figma for mind mapping, collaboration, design, wireframing, user flows, prototypes and testing

Prompt

Transform the charitable experience to be more mobile-forward by incorporating new features to connect with donors, fundraising musicians and key partners. The goal was increase donations, help more people in crisis.

Streamlining the donation process to enable more digital donations, creating automatic records of people interacting with the charity and amplifying events before and after were the most important.

Focusing on a mobile-first redesign of the existing website to include new features for tax receipts, forms to manage profiles, calendar links to events, and social feeds to share feel good storytelling. The volunteer non-profit team was small and needed simple, agile processes that could be sustained into the distant future.

MVP Focus

Features to include:

  • Easier digital payment methods to donate anywhere or time with tax receipts

  • Generate more automation in charitble processes for an agile volunteer non-profit

  • Create an event calendar with reminders to amplify fundraising and reduce searchtimes

  • Increase storytelling to promote fundraising more broadly through multiple channels

Challenges & Opportunities

Psychology of Donating

People don’t need to donate money, time or resources. Yet they do. Research of the local landscape included competitive analysis of other charities, establishing the S.E.T. + C factors, surveys with existing donors, qualitative research at multiple events and generation of personas with user journeys to help create priority guidelines for the project improvements with the goal of increasing donations to help more people in crisis.

Make Donating Easy

Making digital donations available at every touchpoint rather than cash donations would help to create a steady cashflow to the charity. Donors wanted tax receipts and more communication. Charities needed profiles to streamline processes making it easy for reoccurring donations using multiple channels to donate. Creating a CMS of donors, fundraisers & partners increases regular communication and amplify fundraising.

Mobile First Approach

Additions of third party apps to provide more mobile giving was key. Enabling SaaS systems would create an agile charity with minimal staff to fundraise smarter. Use of digital forms to manage profiles, rounding up to purchases to donate, using QR codes for direct links to donate, announce and fuel partnerships. Social sharing of donations and more charitable storytelling would create feel good moments that resonate to donate.

  • Ethnographic Framework

  • Excite

  • Enter

  • Engage

  • Exit

  • Extend