From crisis to recovery - helping UK charities get back on their feet

Wider context

Client: Business in the Community - pro bono project by Accenture

At the start of the UK lockdown, Business in the Community (BITC) decided to use its national network of UK businesses to help struggling charities continue to support their beneficiaries.

To meet this need, they have launched the National Business Response Network (NBRN), a service matching community needs with the right business suport.

Large businesses like Boots, Innocent Drinks, Greggs all stepped up to the challenge, with NBRN making over 2000 matches in just over 3 months. But soon, they found themselves needing a new strategy.

MY ROLE

Senior UX Designer

OTHER TEAM MEMBERS

Product Manager

Junior UX Designer

Researcher x 2

Data Scientist

Only got 2 minutes?

Skip to final design

Problem

Matching business donations to charities requests was unsustainable because of staff overwhelm and inefficient processes.

To match charities to businesses that could help, operational managers were working with two bulky, text-filled spreadsheets. One was showing them requests and one was showing them donations.

The spreadsheets were hard to read through and they had to rely on a mix of memory and search functionality to figure out who can help who. This didn't only mean a lot of time was wated making matches, but also that less charities could be helped and less businesses could offer support.

The NBRN platform was build in only a week, therefore almost no time was spent on creating a smooth process or a positive experience. The charity needed something that worked, now.

With the national situation shifting from crisis to recovery, they saw an opportunity to bring someone external to help them create a more sustainable process.

Users and audience

Matchers

Internal stakeholders were suffering from 'matching fatigue'. Their process was time consuming and they wanted to do more to help.

Donors

Businesses who wanted not only to donate items, but put their employee's time and skill at work too.

Requestors

Overwhelmed charities and local authorities, who were simply too understaffed to meet all their beneficiaries needs.

We arrived at these personas by conducting over 30 user interviews

Taking our client on a design journey

From day 1, one of our design principles was to take our client onboard throughout our journey. We wanted to give them the tools of design thinking, so they could have an approach for solving future problems without our help.

Coming up with hypotheses

Taking all the insights from our research in, together we distilled them into 3 simple How Might We questions:

HMW make the NBRN the go to place for business and community groups to connect?

HMW make the platform valuable to use for local charities and government authorities?

How might we position NBRN as the tool that can help businesses meet their CSR objectives?

Prioritising

To ensure the charity would have a clear view of next steps, we also assisted them with prioritising the most agreed on hypotheses, so they could be tested through future experiments.

In this workshop, we helped them put all prioritised actions on a draft ‘current’, ‘near term’ and ‘future’ roadmap.

Designing the solution

Future-state user journeys

During the second stage of our engagement, our goal was to understand how the ideal future of NBRN would look like and what we need to do to get there.

We kicked off the process with a collaborative workshop, where we designed the ideal user journeys for donors and requestors. The final products of the workshop are the user journeys below:

With all this work done, we also wanted to leave the charity with a starting point for development. Since we didn't know what platform they were going to be using, the design needed to be simple and platform-agnostic.

Based on research, these were the goals I had in mind when designing the prototype:

Make it easy for users to understand what NBRN (National Business Response Network) is
Users come to the website either to donate or to request support. I had to make it easy to reach both actions from every part of the site
Create really simple, easy to fill forms
Show stories of how NRBN helped

NBRN Homepage.png — Making it clear what NBRN is about

**What does NBRN do?**
With user research showing that not all users knew what NBRN was and were unclear about its purpose, it’s important we make it clear from the start in this next version.
**Making the most important actions obvious**
Offering support and requesting support are two main goals of the website, hence why they have been place prominently “above the fold” and are both showing in different colours on the website’s menu.
**Testimonials & stories**
Testimonials and stories build the trust of users. Even when not read, they signal this service is producing positive results for others and therefore it can also support them.

Offer support - Details.png — Easy to fill forms

**Straightforward fields**
Using ‘plain English’ allows users to fill in the form with no interruptions to check what type of information is needed from them at each stage.
**Progress updates**
Allowing users to see where in the journey they are and how long they have left have shown to increase form completion rates.
**Matching fields**
Donor and requestor fields will have similar structure. This will ensure that the data captured will allow for a simplified matching process.

Let’s talk a little more about matching fields

While this was a very simple solution, it was the recommendation we knew would have the largest impact, especially short term.

Collecting the correct data, in a way that makes it easier to analyse later meant matching would be a breeze in the future. The charity could easily manipulate the data in Excel, or look at automation long-term.

Looking at the 2 forms below, that the data captured maps perfectly against each other, to make the matching process easier.

Finding relevant requests

**Enhanced filters**
Added additional filters, based on the new way we’re proposing to capture relevant data.
This will allow users to filter based on criteria that is important to them.
**Easy request scanning**
Isolated the Organisation, Location and Need fields from the description, to ensure the requests are easier to scan.

Constraints

Lack of a tech lead

Because of the short timeline and urgency of the need, we had to kick-off the project with no technology input. We worked on recruiting someone throughout the project, but unfortunately we couldn't find anyone available at such short notice.

As a result, we decided to offer a solution that would work regardless of the technical platform chosen.

Short timeline

The project went from discovery all the way to delivery in only 6 weeks. While this was a constraint, this is also something that allowed us to only focus on the essentials and prioritise what would bring the most value to BITC.

Next steps

BITC is currently implementing the wider recommendations we have left them with.

From a technology and design perspective, we made the following suggestions:

Iteratively test and learn rather than try and build a state of the art technological platform with full automation on day one
Consider use of software as a service providers with high security and privacy standards rather than try and undertake a custom build
Clearly understand the needs and perspectives of key personas (work which we have started on and presented back at the end of the project)

The Accenture project sponsor is in constant contact with the charity to provide additional support.