“Major gift university fundraisers who travel to meet donors need a way to centralize their expense tracking and calendar processes during their business trips.”
Overview
Affinity was originally designed for the in-person fundraising experience, but given the current remote nature of much of the workforce, we were tasked with evaluating how university fundraisers operate under the current circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic. Previously, fundraisers would travel and meet in-person with donors to foster relationships, but this may have changed since the onset of the pandemic. Thus, we were tasked with identifying whether or not the fundraising process shifted due to the pandemic and to adapt to any changes as a result. We aimed to create a tool or modify the existing tool for university fundraisers to foster meaningful relationships despite any changes to their workflow due to the pandemic.
Prior to the COVID-19 breakout, Affinity was designed as a mobile application integrated with the university’s customer relationship management (CRM) system that allowed for the creation and retrieval of contact reports and the scheduling of meetings. We added two valuable features to the existing Affinity mobile application to centralize and expedite the fundraiser traveling process
Final Design and Rationale
Exploring the problem space
Literature Review
Affinity diagram of the secondary research allowed us to create meaningful interview questions for our project. Through this research, we also gained a better understanding of some uncommon words and phrases. This helped us become more knowledgeable before communicating with our sponsor and with our fundraiser interviewees.
Fundraiser Interview
By grouping our interview affinity diagram insights, we were able to identify pain points and opportunities represented across our interviewees. This enabled us to narrow our focus for our next round of interviews: in this case, communication internally and externally within fundraising teams.
Calendar & Expense Tracking Interview
Gathering information from these interviews, we decided to create an expense tracking and calendar application. We also decided to combine all features into one app because fundraisers were constantly switching between systems to process different features during a single trip, which decreased productivity with the increased chance of losing/forgetting items.
My Contribution
- Group leader of the calendar application section
- Voluntarily led the market analysis, sketch, and mid-fidelity mock up activities
- Actively carried out multiple fundraiser interviews and multiple calendar & expense tracking interviews
- Led testing the calendar and expense tracking applications
James Chang's Portfolio 