Recognition from peers and community has always motivated people to give to charity. How can Bright Funds use the power of social media to motivate its donors?

Bright Funds asked us to design social networking profiles for their donors. These profiles needed to facilitate peer and community recognition of donors' charitable giving. They also needed to keep the donors connected to Bright Funds over time and to help them learn about the impact of their charities

Research

We conducted 21 total user interviews, prototype tests, and participatory design research sessions.

Our initial interviewees found it uncomfortable to discuss how they would like to be recognized for their own charitable donations, even if they recognized it as an important motivation for people in general. We needed a way to have our next round of participants engage with the elements of a profile, while keeping it comfortable.

So we created a variety of profile elements from paper and had the next set of interviewees design their own profiles. The playfulness of participatory design got these interviewees past their discomfort and got them talking about how they wanted to be recognized for their charitable giving.

Note that our intention in research was not to have participants design the profiles themselves. Instead, it allowed us to learn about the principals of a successful social networking profile. We passed that information on to a professional designer.

Research-Based Strategy

We decided to focus social networking activity on team-based donation. This decision reflected:

• our user research, which found that team participation in charity sports events was a strong motivator of charitable giving;

• Bright Funds' research into corporate giving, which found that competition between departments and other groups increased employee engagement; and

• social science research into group dynamics, which suggests that collective giving will create positive feelings for the group and provide social validation for individual giving.

We built all of these motivations into our core loop:

Research-Based Design

Two of the primary findings of our user research were that

1. people want privacy control about their public information; and

2. people want to see the organizations they donate to making an impact.

We decided to create dashboards for our users that would parallel their public-facing user profiles. The dashboard allows the returning user to easily perform the tasks that they would want to do on the Bright Funds website. The parallelism between the dashboard and public-facing profile, with in-line editing and easy access to privacy controls for each element, uses design to assure the user that Bright Funds respects their privacy.

The dashboard contains news stories that tell the user about the impact of the organizations to which they donate. The user can choose to propagate that news about their impact to their acquaintances via their choice of Facebook, Twitter, or Google+ accounts or email.

Many thanks to my collaborators on this project, Grant Gordan, Hilary Khteian and Jordan Koplowitz.