Gift of Reading
2017 Dallas GiveCamp
Design Challenge
Seventh grader Monica built a reading program out of encouraging students to collect and give books to peers and younger students. This program grew to support her entire school where each child would receive at least one book every year from the program.
Monica and her mom came to GiveCamp with the goal of increasing the call to action opportunities for book and cash donations so that they could extend this program to more lower-income schools. Working together, we determined there was one additional goal: to fully engage visitors in Monica’s story and captivate prospective donors.
Update & Organize content
How might we refresh Monica’s website so it stays relevant and appears professional to donors and sponsors?
Captivate donors & STudents
How can we tell Monica’s story in an engaging way to teachers, parents, and students so that they might participate?
Maximize donations
How might we give ample opportunity for page visitors to donate where they feel most inclined to do so?
We shared a few early wireframe concepts with survey participants to get them thinking about what they might respond well to.
Baseline Research
Qualtrics Survey
Prior to GiveCamp weekend, we sent out a survey to 15 people without targeting a particular audience. Without knowing much about the program…
- 100% of participants had purchased a book within the last year.
- 80% of those participants had purchased a book within the last month.
- 60% of participants were likely to sponsor a program that connects children to book ownership and 80% were likely to at donate at least once.
With this data, we discovered that the program’s growth opportunities were already strong but would rely heavily on education and great storytelling to draw in participation.
Survey participants shared additional feedback to point us in the right direction:
“Personal connection to the institution would increase my chance of getting involved.”
“I’d like to know that 100% of what I donate goes to the kids and what I give will make a difference.”
“I believe we respond to human needs, and showing a real recipient or a classroom of recipients in an inner-city school… can make a big impact… a single picture can tell a story.”
Solid start, but there’s a catch
Our small team of designers, analysts and engineers were given only one weekend to stand up an entire website redesign. We proposed consolidating content to keep things concise, but what appeared to be simple bordered on a heavy challenge. How do we update the content to effectively tell Monica’s story in a captivating way and do it all in one weekend?
The current navigation uncovered only a small portion of the existing content and left something to be desired for new visitors. Titles like “T-shirt sales” and “A Picture is Worth 1,000 Words Poster” in header navigation didn’t immediately resonate with people who were led to donate books.
When our team discovered some of this content was specific to the student-led Book Ambassador program, we remained flexible to that discovery and carved out more relevant spaces for the existing content.
Prepping for the hack-a-thon
We tried our best to prepare for the GiveCamp event weekend by designing a few comps ahead of the event based on survey feedback and content we understood. While these helped us get started, Monica and her mom were able to provide more expertise during the event to help us educate others about the program. We iterated on these comps to provide final content that would further educate site visitors and resonate with potential donors.
Getting lean
During the hack-a-thon event, we had to make the most valuable use of our time. We took advantage of some whiteboard walls we found in our room so we could all align on changes to the original blueprints quickly and in a highly visible space. This helped the engineers visualize changes to the site and reduced time-to-task.
Race to the finish
With just a couple days to put the site together, we were able to accomplish a few of our goals:
Desktop & MOBILE
We wrapped up the hack-a-thon weekend with an updated desktop & mobile experience, something the original Gift of Reading site had previously not optimized for. Doing this aimed to bring in new site visitors and reduce the exit rate.
RELEVANT CONTENT
Despite challenges with the existing content and understanding how the program worked, we were able to consolidate information in a way that spoke to the program’s unique brand and the potential donors’ needs.
Improve storytelling
We gave site visitors more detail about what spurred Monica to action, and why they should join in too.
EDUCATE THE PROGRAMS
We tied content together in a meaningful way so that visitors understood the programs they could participate in.
Clear calls to action
We provided many opportunities to donate or get involved throughout the site as we educated and captivated site visitors.
Something we missed
Time limitations prevented us from setting up a google analytics instance to get clear and actionable quantitative data to help with future iterations.
Takeaways
A hack-a-thon event is the ultimate sprint. Unlike the Google Ventures Design Sprint, typically events like these leave little time for usability testing. We had to rely on peer review and hope that we made the right decisions for a more targeted audience. “Satisficing” was the name of the game here and we had to understand, with the limitations on time, when something was considered “good enough.” Given the constraints we had and the scope of the work we were given, there are a few ways Monica could iterate:
- Conduct usability testing to gain insight into how the new Gift of Reading site could be improved.
- Add analytics and collect feedback directly from site visitors in realtime.
- Determine if the above KPIs we set to show relevant and helpful content, captivate donors and students, and maximize donations are being met longer term.
Overall, this was a really amazing weekend to work with some great folks out there donating their time to this project. We couldn’t have done it without the help of Kasandra Bell, Chris Jung, Michael Einsohn, Stefanie Orozco, and Monica Orozco.
Any questions?
Thank you for your interest in my work. Feel free to ask me anything.