Percent Pledge is a percentage based monthly subscription donation service aimed at streamlining the donation experience and making it a habitual part of people’s lives. My team was in charge of researching the user base and making changes based on their needs while increasing conversion rates and reducing drop-off.
Percent Pledge
UX Designer
Axure, Sketch
3 weeks
Joel, the founder of Percent Pledge experienced a frustration with the process of donating in the present time. He wanted it to become a larger part of people’s life, while keeping it simple and accessible. He stumbled upon the idea of donating a percentage of a person’s earnings, something he engaged in during his youth for religious reasons.
Percent Pledge is a web-based service enabling users to set up a monthly donation. What sets this service apart are its:
A group of charities supporting the same cause, usually 3-5. Donations to a cause portfolio are divided evenly among the participating organizations.
The service allows the user to input their monthly income, then choose a percentage of it to donate, calculating it and showing the user how much it would be per month.
Upon entering the payment information, Percent Pledge withdraws this amount monthly and donates it to the portfolios the user chose.
Joel wanted to create an easier donating experience by removing the time-consuming process of searching and vetting organizations, placing that burden upon Percent Pledge. Using a monthly subscription service, users can ensure they are constantly making a difference. A percentage system was implemented for users to better conceptualize the amounts they can donate.
We came into the kickoff meeting with 3 goals.
1. To find out more about the product. He explained that the driving forces behind Percent Pledge were its target users: millennials. The biggest barriers for them were not knowing where to give with close to 2 million non-profit organizations. Finding that many millennials are cause driven individuals, his goal was to spark a change in their behavior, making giving a habitual aspect of people’s lives.
2. The motivations and influences behind it. Joel’s motivation and goal was noble, but the scope was huge. He understood that and presented our team with a specific area within the product that needed improvement: the onboarding. Percent Pledge was unique because the onboarding was most of the product. It took the user from registering all the way to confirming their donation payment, an 8-step process.
3. Joel’s goal for our team. Joel’s initial ask for us was clear and specific, he wanted our expertise in researching and determining the issues behind the onboarding. He wanted to know how to increase education and conversion rates for users visiting and beginning the onboarding process. He also stressed the importance of raising the number of people opening the weekly email newsletters, currently at a 50% open rate.
The analytics highlighted that only 10% of users visiting their site begin the onboarding and pass step 1. Of those who complete step one, 50% complete the rest of the process. He assumed the problem was in the first step, which asked for the user’s email address up-front.
To gather a base understanding of the environment Percent Pledge was operating in, we wanted to connect Joel’s knowledge and motivation to the current landscape of giving and donations. He presented us with key information from a global survey on giving. They found that in the United States:
Joel’s research highlighted the importance of a personalized donating experience, having the greatest effects on millennials. We looked into the facets of donation and boiled it down to 3 main ones:
The most common and known about way of donating reflects individual users wanting to make a difference based on their own motivations. This could be for reasons such as natural disasters and relevant causes.
A significant amount of giving is done through a person’s workplace, where many employers choose to match donations by their employees in order to encourage the practice.
Finally, some individuals are loyal to their faith or communities, such as tithers, who donate a percentage of their income to their respective religious organization.
We wanted to make sure the focus was beyond just the product and based our research on the motivations behind donating. While we could solve small problems within the flow of the onboarding, the root of the problem could be much deeper than that. It also matched up with Joel’s goal of changing donating into a more common behavior among millenials. By determining the factors that could influence this behavior, we would be able to drive more users to act upon it and subsequently use Percent Pledge.
We dove into the donating motivations of 7 people in total, 5 potential and 2 current users of Percent Pledge. All participants were between the ages 24 and 31 and all working professionals mostly in the technology fields. After all gathering all of the insights, we used an affinity map to determine main patterns and common clusters.
“I have been involved in my fraternity since college”
Our respondents stressed the influence of their personal network on their donation habits. This comes in the form of donating to organizations or causes they have personal affiliations with, or helping out when asked by friends or family.
“When something grabs at my heartstrings, we should give some money”
For our users to step outside of their social donation circles and stray from relatable causes, we determined that they have to strike an emotional chord within them.
“It’s important to see the impact that I’m making, but the weekly emails are too much”
All users expressed the importance of seeing their impact. The current format of weekly impact emails didn’t have a high engagement rate.
“Genuine thank-you’s and a personalized touch note can go a long way”
Personalized content that showed care were valued above all in terms of feedback.
“I budget on a monthly basis. If i know it’s going to be a tough month, it will decrease my will to donate”
Not all users tend to donate however, many citing budgeting as a determining factor. In instances were money was an issue, respondents elected to donate their time as an equivalent.
We established that millennials value a donation service that showcases impact but allows users flexibility in implementing it into their lives.
The interviews allowed us to piece together the values that influenced the behavior of donating, highlighting what Percent Pledge’s users need. This led us to some character traits of the Percent Pledge persona:
Kristin has a strong desire to look for causes to contribute to. She wants an easy means to donate money, but she needs to be incentivized by goals, empowered by the right features, and connected emotionally to an organization and a cause.
We defined Kristen as Percent Pledge’s target user, in whom we were attempting to spark a change of behavior, making giving habitual. To create this change in behavior, we needed to focus on her motivations to donate as well as her goals in doing so. We framed this change of behavior through a statement describing the problem we were facing:
Millenials need a digital tool that empowers them to donate to charities they believe in and that they feel need their help the most, in a way that matches their lifestyle and ensures their support makes a genuine impact.
Focusing on our interviews, we established the most important points to guide our design: emotional effect, budget, and personalization. We outlined these design principles to serve as guideposts for the remainder of our project.
Our design humanizes charities and the community it serves in a way that inspires users to form a lasting emotional connection to the charity.
Our design empowers users to give knowing that their individual donation big or small contributes to the profound impact from the collective effort.
Our design gives users the flexibility to support the charities that matter to them most in a way that fits seamlessly into their lives.
Our design principles not only guided our design, but also brought clarity and alignment to the team. It allowed us to work within general parameters to avoid expanding our scope wider than we wanted. This proved very useful when we uncovered more ways to improve Percent Pledge outside of the scope of our problem. We collected these insights and presented them to our client at the end for their future teams to evaluate since our team had limited time to work with Percent Pledge.
When it came time for ideation, we revisited our insights from the interview process. After sketching and group feedback sessions, we came up with 3 concepts which included a sketch of the existing Percent Pledge design as a control group:
A donation “marketplace” with tangible items inspired by the user’s need for their money to have an impact. This concept focuses on using donation money to purchase specific goods for those who need it. It also displays progress through tracking goals set up by the charities collecting an amount of pencil cases, school supplies, or any other necessary item.
“It makes sense to allocate my money to a specific person or item. It makes my impact feel more real”
Users prefer to give money to clear and tangible items where they could see their impact directly affect those in need.
“I like the gamification aspect of donation goals, it encourages me to complete them”
Users want to visualize their impact through charity goals, being able to contribute to reaching it. Users also resonated with personal donation goals, challenging themselves to make a bigger difference each time.
A central hub for all the information a user needs in regards to their donations. It includes a history of their donations and statistics. It also allows the user to follow, keep up, and find out about new organizations and their campaigns, bringing all the information users wanted to one place.
“Having all my donations in one place is useful. I can print it out or tally it up for taxes.”
Users like to keep track of donations in one place instead of fishing through email during tax season.
“I would want to see more in-depth information about these organizations and charities to gain their trust.”
Users want to be informed about individual charities to have transparency about where their money is going, who is being affected by it, and how it will be used.
We drew a copy of the existing Percent Pledge product and inserted it as a control group with the other concepts for testing. Some testers have heard or used the product before, so we wanted to test some aspects of it without any bias.
“Generally simpler is better, but since its my money taken out of my paycheck, I feel like I want more customization options.”
Users wanted more customization options to feel in control of where their money was going and the difference they would be making.
“If you’re asking for my salary, I may get scared and not come back. I worry about my privacy.”
The salary question is a big ask. Users expressed confusion when asked for their salary. For some it was a private matter they didn’t feel comfortable sharing.
“Naturally I’m skeptical so I’d like to choose the charities myself.”
Users wanted to choose specific charities their money goes to. Some users were concerned that they wouldn’t support some the charities within a portfolio.
There was a theme of centralization that surfaced during this round of testing. Users appreciated aspects of our concepts that brought all the functions and interactivity together. They liked to keep track of donations in one place as well as seeing goal trackers and data. The testers wanted more than a mere service to donate their money. They wanted a product that would let them see, interact, and customize the impact their money is making and track the difference that person has made on the world.
Staying within the boundaries of our design principles, we were able to reaffirm our previous insights from the interviews. Users still valued seeing their impact, but concept testing uncovered that our testers were very responsive to tangible ways of making an impact. My concept, Jonny’s Pencil Case, was the crowd favorite because users expressed how they could see their impact through the objects that they were “buying” with donations.
This insight led us to modify our design principles to add the effect of “tangibility” to the impact Percent Pledge was trying to convey. We kept Kristin the budget-conscious millennial in mind as a member of her community wanting to make a difference. These were the new guideposts of our design:
Our design humanizes charities and the community it serves in a way that strengthens users’ relationship and commitment to the charity and its mission.
Our design empowers users to give in a way that fits in their budget and is mindful that users financial circumstances vary within a given year.
Our design allows users to feel the immediate impact of their giving through the achievement of tangible goals that are specific, measurable, and attainable.
We focused on changing these specific aspects of the existing product while designing a prototype that would include the valuable insights from the concepts and meet Kristen’s goals. To create a fuller experience to match her goals, we split up the product into 2 functions:
The Percent Pledge home page, where the user can browse through categories of organizations, learn about the product, or sign in.
With every round of interviews and testing, users wanted more information and content about organizations and causes. The current state of Percent Pledge offered a short description of an organization and a video only after a user chooses that cause portfolio. We wanted to place the most important content, the organizations, front and center. It went back to our interview insights which stressed the importance that we establish an emotional connection between Kristen and an organization or cause.
First step: the user inputs their personal information.
Second step: the user chooses some of their interests to begin populating the featured section of the home page.
Third step: the user sets up payment.
We converted the lengthy 8 step process into 3. We also removed the donation aspect from the registration process since our research showed that users wanted to spend more time looking into organizations before actually donating. This allowed them to get set up with an account, and donate whenever they were ready with ease. We kept the screen asking users to input their donating interests, but only to populate their homepage with relevant causes and organizations. Users expressed their concerns with the amount of commitment up front, so we decided to offload that to the second part of the product.
The dashboard was made up of 3 parts: the user’s portfolio, impact update, and charity organizations. It allows the user to interact and customize their giving. Non-registered users are able to try out and interact with the page, but their changes wouldn’t be saved.
The user’s portfolio, is the section showing the current organizations our user was donating to as well as the distribution of money for each. We included the tangibility aspect under each donation sum to show the difference the user was making in real time.
The impact update improves the old weekly email structure by offering an interactive and scrollable feed which shows the organizations the user is currently donating to and showcases their goals and activities.
The charity organizations section offers an accessible way to continue browsing and staying engaged with causes. This creates an interactive aspect to choosing and personalizing the user’s donating experience.
We tested the final prototype with 4 users, an even split between male and female. We wanted to determine:
I learned that:
“It’s powerful to see your impact changing in real time.”
We reaffirmed the importance of seeing impact through tangible objects. Users resonated with the statement that translated the sum of money into a tangible impact.
“Oh, $100 goes a long way, and I can impact more charities.”
Users enjoyed the personalization aspect of the dashboard, being able to add charities and adjust donations. It awarded users the control they lacked when testing the Percent Pledge control concept.
“Giving back to charity for the millennial. I’ve seen this setup before.”
Users could relate to the e-commerce model as intuitive for the millennial population. It seemed familiar to other online services and contributed to the prototype’s ease of use.
“Feels like a ‘try it before you buy it’, it’s really neat.”
Users proceeded to try out the functions before continuing to the registration flow, showing a willingness to convert and donate after getting a taste of the experience.
“I like seeing the impact I’ve had through the places I donated to, here on my profile. The weekly emails felt like spam.”
Users felt empowered by the new showcase of their impact, citing it as an improvement over the often ignored weekly emails.
“This is like a good rabbit hole. I can just
keep clicking and reading and finding new organizations.”
The accessible organization browsing gave users more choice and offered them the information which was mentioned in the interviews and concept testing.
Our testers responded well to the familiar e-commerce model, where they were able to browse and add charities to their dashboard. The familiarity worked together with the function of trying the product before making a commitment, where more than half of the users said they would donate after trying it out. We kept Joel’s principles of simplicity, but made the product more interactive, allowing the many users who wanted to do their own research on organizations. The interactivity had a positive effect on users, making them feel empowered and engaged in the humanitarian process.
The design we proposed to Joel and his partners incorporated a lot of work on their end to materialize, thus we created a product roadmap. This we split into 3 categories, refinements on the current state of the app, added features to improve it based on research, and growing the user base through social media outreach features.
This set-up would prioritize the changes we proposed, starting with small-scale and slowly building into the product Kristen would use often.
I learned to judge the scope of the project against our constraints as a team. This helped me be more realistic about the problems that we could solve with the resources we had at our disposal. It allowed me to maximize our productivity by narrowing the scope and focus our efforts.
I grew as a leader, directing the team towards different approaches and creativity when we were hit with a dead end. It taught me to not be afraid to try a method because there is valuable knowledge even in its failure.