Artistic Fundraising Group
Client: Artistic Fundraising Group
Sector: Fundraising Consultant for Non-Profits
My Role: UX Research, UX Strategy, Responsive Webdesign
Project Time: 4 Weeks
Artistic Fundraising Group is a 6-year-old consulting company specializing in serving low to mid-sized arts-based non-profits. They’re a full-service consulting organization that serves clients on four general levels: per project, pure grant writing, full retainer consulting, and workshop-based education. They’re well embedded in the local Chicago arts community, serving organizations across a variety of industries. Thus far all of their clients have come to them via word of mouth.
High Level Goals
Establishing a professional but welcoming presence that builds confidence in potential clients
To centralize and add some automation to their workshops and professional services
To generate name recognition and a business presence into the wider community beyond word-of-mouth recommendations
Discovering what matters
My initial research plan cast a wide net over the non-profit fundraising world. I broke it out into 3 different areas I wanted to make myself an expert generalist in over the course of my research week:
What artistic fundraising does? How does their process work? What pain point they experience?
What is the current state of the industry? Who is the competition? What difference does hiring consultants make?
To understand why companies/individuals seek out fundraising assistance, as well as what criteria they use to evaluate paying for help and what barriers turn them away
Stakeholder Interviews
Understanding the business itself was an incredibly important foundation. I was able to set up progressive interviews with my stakeholder, with enough time to bring them new questions based on the secondary research I was doing. Together we created an affinity map of project goals, internal concerns, customer pain points, brand adjectives. I also choose to have us do a customer journey map of how their process currently works, to be able to better analyze the wholistic process of acquiring and onboarding clients, so as to be able to zoom in on pain points.
Secondary Research
I dove into the research of both other consulting agencies and the industry as a whole to examine what other companies are showcasing. Because consulting is B2B messaging and features needed to be pointed at multiple members of an organization exploring the site as well as organizations with varied levels of fundraising knowledge and expertise. I audited the websites of some larger national non-profit consulting firms to analyze their messaging as well as identify design patterns and pain points.
User Interviews
Leveraging connections I had within the art industry and thanks to my stakeholder I was able to interview both potential and current customers in positions across the arts industry. These interviews were incredibly informative about how fundraising worked at organizations of different sizes and gaining a better understanding of how AFG as a company was making an impact with the customers it currently served.
Creating tools
A consistent discovery, born out by the research, was that AFG serves companies that vary vastly in their needs. This presented an initial challenge of thinking about design for organizations that were each in very different places in their fundraising journey, this included everything from their goals and fears to their budget size and understanding of industry terminology and practice. This flexibility was also a huge strength of the company, as they have an excellent track record of working with this variety of companies.
To help myself keep this variety in mind I created three different personas. While I did give them specific names and pictures, they are representative of the 3 major company archetypes that makeup different AFG clients.
Research Conclusions
Relationships are the foundation of fundraising
Both to make fundraising happen and for AFG to get themselves hired.
AFG’s real competition is internal talent
As a consulting company, they serve a very unique set of clients, focusing on smaller organizations. But, those organizations are historically likely to hire someone or learn it themselves, rather than thinking to hire a firm like AFG.
There is no one decision-maker
A challenge for B2B UX in general and in this case particularly, is that there isn’t a single user at each company who would make the decision to engage AFG’s services. The messaging and visual design will need to appeal to a number of different positions.
Companies want to feel valued
Hiring a consulting firm in any capacity is a big expense for these organizations. They want to not only see returns but feel like they are unique and valued throughout the process.
Forming a strategy
In beginning to think about the IA and feature road mapping, I utilized a handful of problem statements.
Non-profit leadership needs new ways to expand their fundraising streams because they want to grow
Artistic and Executive Directors need confidence their voice will come through in fundraising language because it empowers their mission and builds their brand
Arts Organizations need someone to guide them through the process of best fundraising practices because they’re at the limit of their knowledge
Arts Organizations need to feel like they’re receiving special attention because they’re making a big investment
Non-Profit boards need assurances that they will see a return on their consulting investment because their resources are limited.
After creating an initial site map and feature priority guide, I met with my stakeholder to specifically discuss terminology and the automation of certain products like workshops and client onboarding.
Going back to our customer journey map and focusing on the personas we concluded that some initial things we considered automating didn’t make sense in the flow of the business and would potentially add additional pain points for both the users and AFG.
As the research concluded, relationships were the most essential part of their business. Putting a form or onboarding flow in front of a customer would not only potentially make that customer feel less important, but it might end up causing more back and forth if they had questions about how to fill it out. As a team of 7, there weren’t any employees who have time to just be answering client form questions or helping them navigate a booking flow.
I also continued to find the balance of serving clients at various knowledge levels a tricky problem when considering the taxonomy and ontology of the pages and terminology used to describe them.
Embracing duality
The problem in the end was part of the solution. Promoting the variety of clients, the customized nature of AFG’s services, and the professional personalization of their business were all strengths that targeted our core user needs.
The categories of the website were narrowed down to focus on four major areas
AFG’s services and values
Foundational Workshops for early-stage organizations
Professional Development for experienced clients
Showcasing the work they’ve done
All of which pushed potential clients towards engaging with AFG and that essential step of establishing a relationship.
I created wireframes and eventually full UI versions for a representative number of central pages that begin to tell the story to AFG potential clients of how their organization can grow with AFG.
The UX of users vs the UX of business
Despite not being practical for every aspect of their services, adding an automated booking flow did end making sense for a handful of their services.
It was an important lesson as an outside UX consultant to consider the needs in this instance of my stakeholders as much as their clients. The stakeholder will need to use and upkeep the website as much as their potential clients may be exploring and using the website.
Testing the structure
As the full content was still in process, I set up some remote user testing using Maze to validate if the basic structures, UX writing, booking flow, and naming concepts worked. Unlike user interviews, I choose not to use target users for this, wanting to see if I had given general users enough clues and directions to make the site usable.
While all users were able to complete the various tasks (booking a coaching session, learning more about a workshop, and contacting the company) 30% did have some trouble locating where different services were. The feedback on the brand itself was overwhelmingly pointed towards our goal of professional, modern, and friendly.
Most helpful was the discovery that when asked to contact AFG 100% of users tested chose to use the contact button in the upper right corner over the central CTA button. Knowing they were easily able to locate and had the confidence to utilize that contact button freed us to rethink where we potentially wanted to direct new users landing on the site. We choose to send them to the services page since that is the most likely reason they would be visiting the site.
The road ahead
Moving into the implementation stage set a number of future challenges.
Content creation
Refined write-ups of case studies, their services, and workshops detail all need to be generated and refined as web copy
Squarespace
While I recommended some alternative methods, the business reality of a small staff and limited time, means Squarespace is the most cost and time-effective product to use for the actual site build. This means facilitating modifying the design to work within those constraints and strategizing with 3rd party calendar extensions to stand in for a fully developed booking flow