Designing content with purpose, for a purpose
By Steven Fields, Senior Content Designer II
At Instacart, one of our core values is to #ServeGenerously, and our 2021 Giving Tuesday campaign really brought this value to life.
Just in time for the annual season of giving, we piloted a feature that made it easy for customers to donate a meal to a nonprofit of their choice at no cost to them. Pretty cool, huh?
Our mission was threefold: Inspire Instacart customers to be agents of change in their communities, fundraise for resource-strapped food banks, and ultimately, provide nourishing meals to people across the U.S. and Canada experiencing food insecurity.
As the content designer on the project, I knew that communication would play a key role in introducing people to the feature and keeping them invested and engaged. There was a lot to figure out, but not a lot of time. So, where to begin?
Call in the subject matter experts
Before I could even consider a content framework, I had to ground myself in the language of social impact. Based on my audit of human-services nonprofits, the words hunger, food access, and food insecurity showed up often.
So, I wondered, what is the rallying cry for our feature? Do we want to end hunger? Support food access? Fight food insecurity? Thankfully for the team and me, Luisa Guaracao from Instacart’s Social Impact team shed light by explaining what these terms actually mean:
- Hunger: Refers to a physical feeling of discomfort when you haven’t eaten (it can be fleeting or it can be constant)
- Food access: Focuses mostly on geography (i.e., proximity to a grocery store)
- Food insecurity: Refers to a lack of financial resources that prevent people from being able to afford nutritious food on a regular basis
With this knowledge, we removed the word hunger from consideration. Another word we avoided was charity. This guidance came to us from Viveka Hulyalkar, CEO of Beam Impact, who — along with her team — supported Instacart with the implementation of the feature. Viveka explained that the word “charity” often carries negative connotations , implying a sense of helplessness (consider the pejorative term “charity case,” for instance).
Of course, the broader context was that of the pandemic, which had forced unprecedented numbers of people to rely on food-access organizations. In November of 2021, when the feature launched, more than 38 million people (including 2 million children) in the U.S. were experiencing food insecurity.
We narrowed our focus. We knew what to leave out and where to lean in. As a team, we rallied around Fight food insecurity. As a content designer, my next task was figuring out where and when to thread that message throughout the product.
Map out the messaging
After digging deeper into the space, it was time to roll up my sleeves and start on the content strategy. As I mentioned, when Instacart customers placed an order during the week of Giving Tuesday, a meal was donated to a nonprofit of their choice. Beyond this initial action, customers could also track their impact — that is, how many meals they contributed toward a nonprofit’s goal.
So, encouraging people to choose a nonprofit (and thereby opt-in to the campaign) was priority number one. We believed that Fight food insecurity was the right message to capture attention, but then it came down to content to get people to take action.
With that in mind, I developed a framework anchored in three interrelated messaging goals:
- Inspire: Get people excited and invested
- Educate: Give just enough details
- Motivate: Keep the feel-good loop going
Based on where a person is in their journey, the messaging goals could be dialed up or down. Customer hasn’t chosen a nonprofit yet? Let’s inspire them to do so. Have they chosen a nonprofit, but not placed an order yet? Time for a gentle nudge. Active participants? Let’s motivate them to grow their impact.
While these messages were interwoven across many in-product components (banners, widgets, and toasts, to name a few), here’s a high-level look at how they were structured on the selection modal.
With the messaging framework as a blueprint, writing the strings — the next step in my process — was a lot easier. (I won’t say easy, because writing never is.) Equally important, the framework gave the larger team visibility into the content strategy, and offered assurance that we were prioritizing the right message, at the right time.
But back to writing for a moment. This is where it was crucial to land the right tone and use words that resonated. Our focus was on people — communities, families, neighbors — and how they are making an impact. Sure, Instacart facilitated the meal donations, but in the spirit of Giving Tuesday, it was all about people helping people.
For example, here’s a look at the instructional carousel that appeared on the impact report, which functioned as the central landing page. Mapping this to the messaging strategy, the overarching goal for this component was to educate, but as you can see from the last slide, there’s a tonal shift designed to inspire.
Spread the word(s)
Inputs from stakeholders? Check. Messaging framework? Check. Copy strings? Check. Next, it was time to document terminology in the form of a feature-specific word list. Early in my career, I might have skipped this step and moved on to the next project. But I’ve come to realize just how valuable a word list can be. Here are a few ways it came into play for this feature:
- Consistency: Aligning on a shared vocabulary with cross-functional content creators helped ensure a more consistent tone and cohesive user experience.
- Efficiency: With key language concepts established and defined, other content creators could simply repurpose rather than starting from scratch.
- Reference: If we decide to iterate on the pilot feature in the future, we’ll have a repository of vetted words at the ready.
Feel (really, really) good
When the Giving Tuesday campaign wrapped up on December 7, 2021, Instacart had donated 259,595 meals in the U.S. and Canada from over 176,000 customers. Here’s what just one of those customers had to say.
This kind of feedback (and lots more like it) made me hugely grateful to have been part of this project. Speaking of gratitude, I’d like to thank my product design partners, Serena Wu and Michael Tallman, product manager Yuki Zhu, marketing manager Courtney Carter, and the entire cross-functional team.
In many ways, doing good work is its own reward. But doing good work while helping do good? It doesn’t get any better.
