COMMUNITYA place for organizers to connect with people emotionally.
OVERVIEWNearly 72% of fundraisers started on GoFundMe are for funeral and memorial or medical purposes. These situations are can already be so emotionally draining that people just get lost in the process and asking for help is often the hardest part when starting a fundraiser.
They have questions about their story, they want help in finding the courage to share among their networks, and they want to connect with others who have gone through similar situations. Our product can help encourage people to share, our customer experience team can help people write their story. But something that is hard to provide is that emotional piece.
With this project, we wanted to give people a space to connect and interact with others who have had similar situations. We hoped to give people a place for support.
Lo-fi wireframes
THE PROBLEMBuilding connections among people when they’re at their most vulnerable is a problem unto itself. How do you encourage people to talk through their situations and feelings? Can you do it in a way that your product is merely a vessel for other people to find each other? We wanted to avoid this becoming a place for people to ask for donations, but that meant having people dig further into what they needed to be successful or not lose hope.
We knew that our social media accounts get flooded with requests for donations and shares and that this same behavior would happen on a messaging forum. Our users lacked guidance on the best way to ask for donations and many didn’t have contacts for those who were successful.
The key to this project would be teaching people how to appropriately use the community but also bearing in mind the best way to help them.
OUR GOALCreate an active community
The best kind of community is one that has members that are active and interacting with others. Fostering conversations and trying to get people who have been successful on GoFundMe (not just people looking for advice) was a major goal for this project.
Incorporating advice from GoFundMe Heroes
Seeing success on GoFundMe from other users is often times the easiest way to give people confidence in starting their fundraiser. But sometimes it can be misleading that their fundraiser will also go viral and raise thousands of dollars in a matter of minutes. Our featured GoFundMe Heroes volunteered their time to help us with this challenge.
Surface relevant topics of conversation
We need to avoid the spamming messages asking for donations but didn’t want to discourage people from coming to the community. We needed to understand the core of of why people couldn’t get donations - was it their story? Was it the way they shared their fundraiser?
MY ROLEFor this project, I acted as lead product designer and brand designer. I oversaw this project from research to launch and these were a few of my tasks:
Strategized the hierarchy of the page, creating lo-fidelity wireframes and hi-fidelity mockups to conceptualize the interactions for users (pages included: landing page, discussion page, category page, sign-up/sign-in, creating a profile, post page)
Worked with the development company to integrate the designs into their system, using Vanilla and then integrating it into a new hosted platform, Insided
Created brand assets for badges, avatars, category cards, and hero image illustrations
Collaborated closely with VIP and marketing for launch and met with other parts of the product to add entry points to the Community
Completed design QA once Vanilla completed their customization piece and provided feedback on future iterations
Design QA and feedback
Survey results showed that 63% of users wanted tutorial videos on how to get started.
THE APPROACHActive community
We strove hard to get an active community going. Since this was an entirely new product to GoFundMe, we were using research and data to drive the topics. A survey was sent to over 20,000 recent organizers on GoFundMe asking what kind of support would help them the most on their fundraising journey. We received nearly 12,000 responses back and had those results synthesized.
It showed that organizers wanted the following:
Help from other organizers who have had success
Tutorial videos on how to best make a fundraiser
Sharing tips and advice
This helped us formulate an idea around the hierarchy of the page and our strategy for engagement.
Topics of conversation
From the survey results and incoming customer inquiries, we could hypothesize the most successful topics of conversation we could launch with. We didn’t want the community to be empty when we launched, but rather we wanted to have started some conversations so our new members wouldn’t have to take that initiative.
By starting the topics of conversation and choosing the categories, we were also able to avoid and redirect conversations that we didn’t want clogging the community. Some things we wanted to steer clear of were topics that generated any hostility towards groups or people, technical support (we wanted our customer service team to handle those questions), and donation requests.
We knew that even though we were going through the research results, the actual activity would vary so we had a few other categories to launch with should the other rooms not be as successful.
Words of advice
Our users wanted to hear from other organizers. With our GoFundMe Heroes program, we had a wealth of organizers who were willing to help us with this. We just had to figure out how.
A few ideas came to us. The survey showed people wanted video tutorials so we thought videos of our Heroes would be one way to fulfill that. We also thought that perhaps they could help launch some of the conversations and engage with the community to start, sending replies to users.
We worked with marketing and our VIP team to get the videos created. They didn’t want these high quality videos as they wanted the Heroes to feel more tangible and real. And during this time of video calls during a pandemic, it was as close as we could get to these Heroes being in the same room as them.
They also agreed to engage in the community and respond to new organizers voluntarily. We had given them special badges to indicate that they were verified GoFundMe Heroes and sent them swag to thank them for their time. Our Heroes were key to giving the advice our team lacked and were the right people to chat with struggling organizers.
THE RESULTSThe community launch was slow at first. We realized a lot of the folks interacting with community didn’t really know how to interact on a message board or forum so we had shifted some of the categories to have our community team help people understand how to use the community.
We also did see an initial influx of donation and share requests as predicted but once our community team was able to redirect those conversations, we started to see more high value conversations of people asking for advice. However, once those people started asking new questions, they rarely sought out their answer from other people so the community was full of questions and little interactions or responses.
Our Heroes really did save the day as they provided responses to people and then get follow ups. They helped set the tone and their words inspired other people to also give advice.
After the first month, we changed some of the categories to include one that was a “how-to” guide for using the community, written by our team.
Within two months, we were able to find the right balance with categories and iterate on the community. We changed the hierarchy, introducing the community before the Heroes videos, then we inserted those videos into the various categories that they applied to.
After launch, and once our community hit 10,000 users, we saw an increase in organizers receiving their first donation and a decrease in customer inquiries asking for help on their fundraiser. We were able to hit our goal and plan for V2 of the Community which would be incorporating the newest design system styles.