Impact Platform - Blackbaud Donations Allocation Solution

By Sijie Yang | Gene Dreyband | Tiffany Jen

According to Giving USA 2012, an individual looking to make a charitable gift to a nonprofit is faced with choosing among the 1.08 million charitable organizations in the United States. In addition, despite varied motivations across different people, the majority of donors are less likely do research before giving. Here comes the question - How do people appropriately align their values and motivations for giving with the organizations that they give to? In this one-week project, our challenge was to design a solution that helps individuals make a better informed choice when allocating their donations.

With thinking about making donations from a real donor's perspective in mind, we adopted two personas which were characterized by insights that we gathered from online research and conversations with friends who had donation related experience. We found out that 1. People often make donation decisions based on personal reasons; 2. Most donors have the desire to contribute to causes they believe in; 3. Potential donors are more motivated to take action if their friends are already involved. The personas benefited the production of our concept - Blackbaud Impact Platform.

In our design, we want to help existing donors by showing them the impact they HAVE made and help potential donors find the causes they care most about as well as the impact they CAN make. Wireframes made by Balsamiq and scenarios made by Adobe Illustrator were used for presenting our concept.