CHEM

CHEM: Streamlining Endowment and Donor Management for All

Role

Product Designer

Timeline

Spring 2024 semester (3 months)

Team

2 Product Managers, 4 Designers

Background

Before we begin — what's an endowment fund?

An endowment is a gift made to a charitable foundation that is set aside (invested) to fund the organization's activity perpetually. Donations to endowment funds are tracked in units. Unitization is the act of tracking the changes in the value of an endowed donation as the fund grows.

On the other hand, general funds do not accrue value and their assets are spent over a shorter period of time.

Problem

Small nonprofit endowments are left without options

While major nonprofit organizations and foundations with large endowment funds have the financial capabilities to use paid software to manage their assets, smaller nonprofit organizations have no choice but to use Microsoft Excel.

However, using Excel spreadsheets to manage multiple funds and their individual gifts is time-consuming, laborious, and error-prone.

The Cornell Hack4Impact chapter sought to create an in-house solution...

Solution

Seamless donor and endowment management

We created a free, open-source, and easy tool to manage not just your endowment, but your donors, as well!

Here is a teaser of our mid-fidelity prototype:

Research

Not just an endowment management problem!

Initially, we intended this project to simply be a downloadable endowment management system.

However, after conducting interviews with five financial managers at different nonprofits, we discovered that this would not fully address our users’ goals. We discovered these user research insights:

Donors are also difficult to manage

Managing their relationship with endowment contributors is difficult and decentralized.

Endowment and general funds are managed together

Their general funds are managed in the same laborious process as their endowed funds.

Customization is key

Customization in management tools is important for tailoring the tool to your organization, working with the tool rather than against it.

Syncing workflows

Managing contributors and finances is frustrating to do separately. Users currently use different platforms for managing donors and funds, which is laborious to update.

I organized my interview notes into an affinity diagram below:

Affinity diagram of user insights

These insights were quite significant to our conceptualization of our product, and different than our anticipated PRD and MVP solution. We desired to address these pain points in our solution, so we pivoted to a new solution:

A fund management system for both endowed and general funds that seamlessly integrates a CRM (Customer Relationship Manager) to manage donors.

Broadening our competitors to CRMs and all fund managers

With this pivot, we expanded our competitor research to both paid endowment management softwares and competitor CRM platforms.

Competitor platforms

Donor communication timeline

Filtering and customization

Difficult to navigate and digest

Not enough visualizations or reports

Exploration

Integrating fund management and CRM features

Using these insights, we moved onto creating our (much larger than expected) information architecture. We decided to separate the pages of the platform into endowment-related functionalities (green) and donor-related functionalities (red).

Our information architecture

Moving a bit too fast...

We advanced to low fidelity sketches:

The first iteration of brainstorming sketches

And then to mid fidelity mockups:

The first iteration of mid fidelity mockups

You might notice that we’re moving pretty fast! Unfortunately, this was a mistake that cost us valuable time. We went into mid fidelities too quickly, without noticing glaring issues with our information architecture, which we should have spotted in our low fidelities. I added the potential issues and concerns we had on the blue sticky notes:

Commented revisions (blue) to our information architecture

We struggled to efficiently integrate these two workflows together. I now realized that these endowment and donor functionalities are deeply intertwined; by stepping away from a hardened separation of the two, I was able to create a better structure for our platform.

Here is our final information architecture:

CHEM's final information architecture

mid fidelity prototype

Where we're at right now...

We spent more than half of the semester exploring in mid-fidelity. Here are the main flows I prototyped:

Add a fund

Delete a fund

Add a transaction

Delete a transaction

Reflection

A work in progress...

Our user interviews broadened this project's scope, expanding the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) and our timeline. Thus, we weren't able to reach developer handoff this semester.

While I was only designing on CHEM from UXR to mid fidelity prototyping, I have been continuing my involvement in the current designers' process through providing design feedback and monitoring progress.

I hope to see this product launched in the near future and see a tool available to all nonprofits, regardless of endowment size.

An investment in my skills!

Optimizing team collaboration

We initially split up our pages between us 4 designers; however, this led to our mid fidelities looking very different and we had to redesign every page for consistency. I learned the importance of synchronous teamwork to design a seamless product.

Comprehension is key

I was quite unfamiliar with endowment management and financial tools prior to this project, but learned so much from our users and competitors. To create the best solution, I realized the importance of fully understanding the problem through user interviews and competitor analysis.

Being a mentor is a gift

This was my first time mentoring new designers. While I was nervous to take on a mentor role, this project showed me how leading others is both fulfilling and solidifies my own understanding. This experience inspired me to pursue fostering design communities at Cornell.