CAL’S ANGELS

 Project Overview

Cal’s All-Star Angel Foundation, Inc.(Cal’s Angels) is a 501(c)(3) pediatric cancer foundation with a mission of granting wishes, raising awareness and funding research to help kids fighting cancer. Over the course of 3 months, we employed a user centered design approach to create and develop potential solutions that would aid their foundation in building awareness of their mission through improving and scaling their current fundraising and event partnership experience.

Methods

Staff and Stakeholder Interviews, User Interviews, Field Studies, Competitive Analysis, Interview Coding, Thematic Analysis, Journey Mapping, Heuristic Analysis, Process Flow Diagramming

Tools

Atlas.ti, Mural, Crunchbase, Adobe XD, Flow.io

Project Goals

• How can we strengthen Cal’s Angels current fundraising and event partnership experience?

• How might we help Cal's Angels scale the success of current event partnerships into new fundraising and event opportunities?

My Role

My role included developing our user centered research strategy, conducting primary and secondary research methods and analysis, moderating on-site observations and interviews, conducting heuristic and cognitive website evaluations, and synthesizing qualitative and quantitative data to develop key design insights and themes. Additionally, I designed the High School ‘Go Gold’ Experience Map, Automation Tool Competitive Analysis, and aided in the design of our final website mockups and ‘Go Gold’ Toolkit.

 Research Process

Our team employed a user-centered research approach aimed at effectively helping Cal’s Angels scale their current fundraising opportunities, develop their event partnership experiences, and improve the online donation methods. These methods helped us appreciate the current characteristics, challenges, and needs of both Cal’s Angels staff and stakeholders. Below is an overview of each of the several research methods we employed:

We conducted several rounds of in-person and remote interviews with Cal’s Angels staff, current event partners, and families to understand the unique organizational needs of Cal’s Angels and develop an effective user-centered research approach.

• Interviews with Cal’s Angels Staff

  • Helped our team learn more about Cal’s Angels organization, determine our research scope and goals, and begin brainstorming potential recommendations and solutions.

  • Provided information about Cal’s Angels donation software and helped our team brainstorm ways to to increase engagement and involvement with their digital fundraising platforms.

• Interviews with High School ‘Go Gold’ Partners

  • Helped us learn more about the High School ‘Go Gold’ event partnering experience and how our team could potentially help improve the process for both Cal’s Angels staff and current and future partners to increase awareness of and engagement in these types of partnerships.

• Interviews with Parents & Caregivers

  • Informed our team about personal journeys, perspectives, and overall experiences with Cal’s Angels and involvement in their several programs and events, as well as providing insight into the characteristics, motivations, and values of Cal’s Angels directors and staff.

Our team researched several different cancer organizations to learn more about what they provide in terms of support for creating events and fundraising with outside partners. We were able to use crunchbase to determine the best direct competitors in the nonprofit space, as well larger national organizations that Cal’s Angels wished to emulate.

• This analysis helped determine how to potentially integrate different tools and strategies for event partnering and fundraising to develop specialized solutions for Cal’s Angels that would improve their event and fundraising experience.

• It demonstrated how similar organizations presented information about forming partnerships, event hosting, and their programs and services on their online platforms and provided insight into potential strategies for incorporating new online donation strategies for Cal’s Angels’ website.

We conducted a heuristic analysis and cognitive walk-through of the ‘Go Gold’ and ‘Just Shave It’ web pages to uncover:

• Any issues in their on-boarding and sign up processes for the several events and programs Cal’s Angels provides

• Any opportunities to increase engagement and involvement from both returning and new visitors to their website

We evaluated Cal’s Angels’ ‘Get Involved’, ‘Awareness’, and ‘Events’ web pages to discover ways to:

• Improve the information architecture, content, layout, and overall presentation of information on each page

• Showcase more of Cal’s Angels events, programs, and fundraising opportunities to increase user interest and engagement in those areas.

• Discover ways to improve current donation methods and integrate new online donation features to develop more fundraising opportunities.

 Major Insights & Themes

After analyzing and synthesizing the primary and secondary research, We identified three major challenges and opportunities for growth regarding expanding current fundraising opportunities, developing the event partnering experiences, and improving online donation strategies. Below is the description of both the problem and potential solutions that we developed and presented to Cal’s Angels staff:

Problem:

‘Go Gold’ games provide a large source of community engagement, awareness, and fundraising potential. However, the interviews uncovered that these events are difficult for high schools that do not have prior experience organizing, hosting, and managing large-scale events.

A Successful Solution Will:

• ‘Productize’ the ‘Go Gold’ high school hosting experience by packaging the necessary information, media, tools, and support needed to organize and host this type of event from start to finish.

• Help Cal’s Angels scale this event to reach a larger number of high schools and communities by providing easier methods for signing up, organizing, and hosting ‘Go Gold’ games.

Problem:

Cal’s Angels ‘Get Involved’ and ‘Awareness’ web pages currently lack content, information, and calls to action that may lead to less engagement and involvement in their several events, programs, and campaigns. 

A Successful Solution Will:

• Improve current website on-boarding strategy to promote more online signups and engagement in Cal’s Angels several events and programs (e.g. Go Gold games, Team Cal, Just Shave It, Pop Up parties).

• Improve web content layout to highlight more opportunities to ‘Get Involved’ to increase awareness and engagement in Cal’s Angels events.

• Provide more information on ‘Get Involved’ and ‘Awareness’ pages to help first time visitors understand more about Cal’s Angels current events and programs.

Problem:

Cal’s Angels uses several online donation tools (e.g. GiveGab, NetworkForGood) that are not effectively integrated on their online platforms. They have been missing opportunities to increase donations and limiting their fundraising and donation potential.  

A Successful Solution Will:

• Help Cal’s Angels improve current website strategies to include more information and access to GiveGab to create personal fundraising pages and increase overall donations.

• Promote more engagement in and awareness of GiveGab campaigns which will lead to more awareness and fundraising opportunities for ‘Just Shave It’, Glow Walk’, and ‘Go Gold’ events.

 Mapping the Experience

Solutions & Recommendations

‘Go Gold’ Tool kit: Productizing the Partnership Experience

Based on the challenges we uncovered during the interviews and observations, we created a ‘Productized’ partnering experience by packaging the hosting experience to provide current and potential event partners with the all the tools and support needed to start and host Go Gold games. This will help improve the event partnering experience by:

• Reducing the overall time investment and micromanagement needed to organize, manage, and host Go Gold games and events.

• Helping Cal’s Angels scale this event effectively to reach more schools and businesses and increase awareness of and engagement in Go Gold games.

• Setting all expectations for high schools and businesses that wish to ‘Go Gold’.

Website Wireframes & Improvements

Our website evaluations identified several opportunities for improvement related to improving Cal’s current content presentation and incorporating an improved online donation strategy. Our wireframe design strategy was focused on streamlining processes to create efficient workflows for all stakeholders involved by:

• Providing more information on how to "Get Involved" by redesigning relevant web pages to showcase more events and improve the overall information architecture, content, and layout of these pages.

• Improving the "Get Involved" page by providing more relevant information about “Go Gold” and other ‘Awareness’ event partnership opportunities. 

• Improving current website on-boarding strategies for high schools and businesses to promote more online sign-ups for ‘Go Gold’ and ‘Just Shave It” event partnerships.

• Incorporating new donation strategies to allow users to create their own ‘personal fundraisers’ and provide more information about their current donation programs.

Below is a preview of the mockups we created using Sketch 3 and Adobe XD. Click the button below to view all of the interactive wireframes.

Integrating Donation Software: Creating Personal Fundraisers

Based on our initial research insights, our team created mock ups for a new feature on Cal’s Angels website to integrate the GiveGab donation tool onto their website to:

• Allow users to create their own fundraising pages on GiveGab to share with their social network and to increase number of donations from their several events.

• Highlight Cal’s Angels several current GiveGab campaigns to increase awareness of those events and provide easier access to donate.

The tutorial video below showcases the new “create a fundraiser” option using our interactive wireframes to demonstrate how this new feature would be integrated onto Cal’s Angels’ website.

Incorporating Automation Tools

Based on the major insights gathered from our interviews with both current event partners and Cal’s Angels staff, we determined that we could help Cal’s Angels implement an automation tool that would benefit them by automating repetitive and everyday tasks to allow them to focus on more important aspects of pediatric cancer fundraising. We created a competitive analysis of 3 automation tools and recommendations and designed a snapshot of a potential automated process flow for the ‘Go Gold’ sign up process. Click the images below to view the full comparative analysis and process flow.

Future Work & Recommendations

 Implement Website Mock-ups

• Implement the website wireframes and mock-ups as a guide to redesign your webpages to showcase more opportunities for users to get involved in Cal’s Angels initiatives. 

• Provide more access to and information about GiveGab and creating personal fundraisers to increase awareness and donations for pediatric cancer research.

Assess the automation tools

• Analyze each of the three automated tools that we have researched to decide which is best suited for your organization.

• Assess how these tools integrate the online applications you use to increase productivity and help Cal’s Angels staff focus on more important tasks

Utilize the ‘Go Gold’ Tool Kit

• Update the ‘Go Gold’ Toolkit with more materials that are necessary for High schools to successfully organize and host Go Gold games and events.

• Compare event organizing tool kits that other cancer foundations use as a guide to determine what resources would be helpful for future high school event partners.