Design of a charity app for a digital generation
Service Design | Concept generation
Starting with only a simple pick-and-donate web-only donation platform, our team was asked to develop the concept for a charity app that would integrate the client’s existing web-based platform and attract new, mobile-first and currently not used to donating users while also integrating it into the wider banking digital products ecosystem.
Services
Team coordination;
Concept generation; Service design; Wireframing
Client
Leading banking & charity player
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Challenges
Despite an initial clear and exciting brief, my team and I faced the quite unusual challenge of a client team that did not really believe that achieving the proposed goal was actually possible.
Sure, the context in which we were to operate was not an easy one.
Being the client first and foremost a major banking player, one of their main concerns was to trade carefully with the communication of their charity donation platform, as the potential for a communication disaster and backlash is always around the corner.
On top of that, the practical experience they had gained over the years told them that the average user of their donating platform were usually middle to older aged and generally well-off people, with a clear preference for one single campaign over the thousands proposed on the platform.
This made them skeptical in regards to the return of investment that developing a mobile app naturally targeted to a different segment could actually bring, despite being aware that recent competitors and trend analysis suggest a changing of tides on the matter.
Moreover, whilst the usual driver for donations often is a great attachment of donors to the cause they are supporting, such factor was excluded to us, as the platform does not focus on a specific topic or campaign, but rather functions as a display window for a variety of well-doing and morally just causes to support.
Yet, we did not despair.
Approach
If we had to convince the client that the goal could actually be achieved, we knew we had to come up with a strong and unexpected concept, based on hard evidence and capable of bringing tangible values to the table, so we deep-dived into a thorough user research session.
After conducting multiple benchmark analysis and researches on behaviours and trends common to the new target audience identified - young adults with entry to mid level jobs, generally progressive and with a mobile-first attitude - a few key concepts gradually became very clear to us:
1. Younger people tend to be relatively more conscious of their impact in society and are willing to put in some effort to improve their surrounding.
2. They don't have much capital at their disposal, but are comfortable spending small amounts recurrently for things they care.
3. They do not care for downloading yet another app if that does not bring tangible benefits to their life or isn't strictly necessary.
Building at first on this last point, rather than focusing on how to make the donation function appealing to our audience, we tried to look at ways in which an app could provide benefits to our target through some internal brainstorming sessions.
During these sessions, we managed to connect the dots between all the findings of our research and finally came up with what eventually became our winning concept:
A charity app that acts like personal assistant, supporting users in achieving personal growth goals and turning their efforts into tangible means to support those campaigns that mean the most to them.
Through the concept proposed, users could therefore set simple but life changing goals, like reducing the amount of coffees drunk in a day, track the savings made each day and then convert them into a donation for one of the many campaigns available, or connect it directly to the saving tool available in the client’s mobile banking app.
Results
As we hoped, the concept proposed managed to change the skeptical
client's mind.
However, business constraints did not allow for the concept to be fully developed in the timeframe disposable at the time, so instead some key elements of the concept were set to be implemented in the mobile banking currently used in order to give the business time to assess their actual value and postpone the development of the app to a later time.