Introduction:

• Givkwik connects companies, causes and communities through turnkey “cause marketing” and employee engagement software and services.

• The name: Givkwik comes from “give quick”.

While traveling through South America, the founder was inspired to create ways to give easily, quickly. The ATMs there allowed him to donate monies to charities/causes and that sparked an interest to innovate a form of “impulsive philanthropy” for giving on a consistent basis, as well as “doing good”, while doing something else.

Company Background

Givkwik is a SAAS company specializing in “Impulse philanthropy” with an understanding of corporate responsibility, giving scenarios. Impulse philanthropy is driven by a ‘feel good’ effect and by the recognition that the donor themselves expect from it.

1. Sitting in the realm of “cause marketing” it provides ‘software as a service’ to the party representing the beneficiary.

2. Provides an engaging platform for corporate employees / donors fulfilling (but not solely confined to) corporate responsibilities.

3. Enables speedy launch of a fund raising campaign.

Client Brief / Design & Research Opportunity:

• Develop a group-based experience where friends, family, customers or employees contribute to a shared fund and decide how/where to to distribute the funds.

• Research & design wireframes for groups called ‘Giving Circles’ to communicate and make giving decisions which are shared with the public and allow the larger community to follow the group’s lead.

Measures of Success:

• New users • New donations & causes • Session time • Interaction between users

Discovery Phase Challenges & Project Pivot:

1. Clients wanted specific outcomes for a new feature centering around their niche product branding.

2. After client intake, upon sharing a draft of my research plan based on subject review, clients responded that their vision was not defined yet on product road map.

3. What they envisioned, we discovered could be a stand alone feature, not an “essential” feature for the main product’s optimization.

4. What they wanted to do was gather the possibilities of their ideas and concepts, grounded in fieldwork and visualize them as mock-ups.

5. As UX designers we proposed to explore goals of user acquisition and donor re-engagement from a user-centered perspective, which on the Minimal Viable Product scale would be a high priority feature, i.e., essential & low-cost, delivered as wireframes ready for development after the 3-week sprint.

6. Gamification is a vast specialty so our approach was to use user insights on precepts & behavior, pain points, usability etc for interaction & engagement.

7. However, the brand mission was to create “giving” in ways not immediately recognizable as ‘giving’, easily infusing philanthropy as part of life, perhaps even change perceptions of how social impact can be made. Hence, gamification was conceived as a means to keep users in a gaming “rabbit hole” whereby the sum total of users’ time is spent giving.

   [Perhaps this was because Givkwik pitched directly to corporations and did not depend on the product itself for revenue, while channeling funds to causes.]

8. As a User Experience designer, the first challenge was to outline the pain points in their existing product, situate the new feature in the MVP, but salvage the delivery of a “nice-to-have” feature further ahead in its roadmap in the form of med/high-fidelity wireframes that helps the client have a more defined vision of their product’s future mock ups.

Conclusion: from a research perspective, having clients as participants/stakeholder was valid insight to world of philanthropy and their business efforts harnessed knowledge of participatory behavior a target audience (corporate employees) in a particular realm of (cause) marketing.

Stakeholder Participant intake details

Client Stakeholder Profiles / Background to their Approach in Design Collaboration

Research Plan & Timeline

“Contextual Inquiry” and Google Analytics of existing Givkwik users was nulled because the product was used by HR departments, not individuals.

Revised Research Methodology

Updated Brief / Opportunity: Giving Circle feature incorporates visual and game-like ways for groups to communicate about their giving decisions.

Affordance Design Details:

1. Join a Group / Create a group: • to support a cause, • donate together.

2. Should allow the Circle Creator • customization, • share-ability, and • ease of use.

Design Opportunities:

1. Donations do not reach causes

2. Re-engagement Solutions

3. Experiential solution.

4. Both donors and causes benefit when donations and the act of giving is vivified and direct.

Execution of Research

• Survey questions prepared from: key informants, competitive analysis & client conversations.

• Eighteen interviewees derived from fifty seven survey respondents.

• Crowd Funding Research (including case study on Kickstarter)

• Gamification Research (including case study of Games for Change)

Guerrilla execution of survey method

With 5 days allotted to research within the discovery phase, I decided guerrilla research was required to hasten the process. To establish an understanding of donation precepts I needed at least 40 survey responses to quantify results. So, in the quest to narrow down people displaying philanthropic behavior and without existing Givkwik users to interview or observe:

• This approach allowed access to people; ask questions to orient myself about donor behavior.

• There was no budget to recruit people/users, so I dressed and acted like a friendly student. Mike and I went to Madison Square Park.

  Behavior = Motivation, Ability, Trigger

  
  

3 Key Informant Interview Notes

User Insights on Crowd Funding Projects

Why Do You Need to Code Your Qualitative Data?

Coding the qualitative data makes the messy scripts quantifiable. How are you going to convince the stakeholders that the insights you collected in the interviews actually reflect users’ needs and wants but not something you just eyeballed five minutes before the meeting? Simple, show them your data.

Codes in qualitative research are as important as numbers in a quantitative study. Your codes give you credibility when presenting them to your teams, your clients, and your stakeholders. With proper coding, you can say with confidence that these findings are in fact, representing the majority of user feedback.

Steps from Home to Action

• Crowd Rise 3 Steps • Kickstarter 4 Steps • Givkwik 5 Steps

“Candy Crush” mechanic + Team + Facebook induction

Pain Points using Givkwik:

• No Search Bar in Home Page.

• Being able to see the other steps before joining a circle.

• Should be able to calculate monthly donations below, as percentage of annual salary.

• Not being able to control the time line of payment.

• Payment is too complicated.

• Payment should be last.

• Where is the money going?

• How is the money being used?

• How am I getting updates?

interview transcripts for Gamification & DESIGN GUIDE / Technical Research documentation from “Games for Change”.

• From initial interviews and case studies like “Games for Change”, I discovered that groups competing against each other would be a possible incentive for people to engage in playing a game for funds (to donate, for a cause of choice).

Hence, I organized a focus group to help narrow down the type of game that could be applied for Givkwik platform.

Focus Groups with participants to explore game concepts

(1) Page flows for the feature by comparison and analysis of competitor sites. (2) Whiteboarding of Gamification flow.

Gamification: theories

Gamification centers around “Flow Psychology,” based on the creative moment when a person is completely involved in an activity for its own sake.

When we are involved in [creativity], we feel that we are living more fully than during the rest of life

- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Area for Opportunity: Positive psychology

An application of positive psychology surrounding philanthropy/giving to other & the flow state achieved by playing games via http://janemcgonigal.com/play-me/

• The full range of positive emotions and engagement

• Stronger social connections and relationships

• More Resilience in the face of challenges and obstacles

• More ambitious and surprising accomplishments

• Service to something bigger than ourselves

3 Rules about Gamification

• Game needs to be designed on a macro & micro level

• Presents challenges that require increasing skill

• Giving users feedback, e.g., through coins, is required.

• There is a narrative over the course of this journey. Typically there are mysteries and escapes or real narratives, which converse within the game universe.

• There are multiple styles of play: role playing, difference skills requires etc

Project Phase: Definition

Giving Circles is a feature that allows individuals to connect with each other and social causes while enabling philanthropy.

USER DeFINITION: PriMARY & SECONDAry personas

User Journey Map: made with notes taken during observation of people browsing Givkwik & competitive sites (Crowd Rise, Go Fund Me etc).