Improving Our Teacher Sign Up Flow

At DonorsChoose.org, our teachers are our content creators. Their requests for classroom resources and experiences, descriptions of their students, and classroom photographs bring our site to life. We’ve done a lot of work to improve the teacher experience, but a redesign of one of the most crucial parts of the teacher funnel—the sign up flow—was long overdue.

DonorsChoose.org teacher funnel with the focus of this redesign highlighted in yellow.

For this redesign, we focused on the highlighted section of the funnel (completing registration > confirming email address > starting first project). After all, we’re not interested in just getting teachers to create an account — we want them to post a classroom project so they can get the funding they need!

Here’s a breakdown of this part of the funnel to show just how problematic it was:

The focus of this redesign.

Not only were less than half of teachers completing registration, but the attrition on these three steps in the funnel means that only 34.8% of the teachers who entered the sign up flow went on to start their first project.

As the numbers suggest, our previous sign up flow was challenging for our teachers in a number of ways, but the tl;dr version is that it was outdated and overly complicated. Here’s a quick look at what our teachers were up against.

The sign up flow before we embarked on this redesign. It was a lot.

Main problems with the old design

• Holy hell there are a lot of steps (with multiple sub-steps)! This is a big undertaking and we’re asking for a lot of information. Can we make it feel less like work? Many steps/asks feel unnecessary.
• The sign up flow is totally disconnected from project creation. Instead of forcing teachers to stop post-registration, can we tie these together for an easy first-run experience that gets teachers into their first project?
• We don’t get teacher’s email address until the last step of the process so there’s no way to follow-up with teachers who don’t complete registration.
• Confirming email address is a pain in the horns. It can take up to 15 min!?! It’s a momentum killer for motivated teachers who are already on our site.
• Not mobile-friendly. Welcome to the 90’s, Mr. Banks!

Eliminating the unnecessary

Here’s the exhaustive list of information we were requiring from our teachers in the old sign up flow:

All of the required info from the old sign up flow.

To help pare this list down, the project team ran through an exercise where we challenged ourselves to start anew and identify fields that were absolutely necessary to create an account. If we couldn’t convince the project owner that it was essential, it got the axe. Here’s what we came up with:

Removing all non-essential asks for the redesign. From 15 fields to 5!

As for passwords, we decided to go completely passwordless for our teachers, relying instead on an email verification link to authenticate. This seemed like a scary idea at first, but the fact that password-free accounts and sign ins are becoming more prevalent around the web and the fact that no one got tripped up on this in our user testing sessions made it less so. We’re still watching it very closely, but so far it seems promising!

The simplified flow

Those five essential fields became a simple two-step process, grouped by contact information and teaching details:

Step 1, getting the essentials: email address and name.

Step 2, teaching details and implicit acceptance of our terms.

After they click that big green button, new teachers are fully registered and primed to start working on their first project. So instead of telling them how to do that, we land them on the first step of the project creation flow with content tailored to first-timers. The goal is to help build their mental model of what a DonorsChoose.org project is and to give them some forward momentum.

The first step of project creation for first-timers.

Promising results

Registration Completion Rate:

• Before: 47.5%
• After: 67.8%

That’s a 42.8% improvement, which we were all excited to see! And the improvement on mobile devices was an even more impressive 90.7% (29.6% before; 56.4% after).

However, getting teachers through registration wasn’t our only goal. To make sure that we weren’t just pushing our problems further down the funnel, we’ve been closely monitoring what we call activation rate. We define activation rate as the rate of teachers who post a project within two months of registering. This is why it was so important for us to focus on building momentum on project creation early on.

Since we launched the redesigned sign up flow, activation rate increased slightly right away (+3%), in large part because of the increase in teachers posting projects in the same session (+19.5%). We were prepared for this to be flat (or even to dip slightly) because we knew we’d be adding a whole lot of new teachers into the group that needs to post their first project to activate. We already shipped a new series of emails designed to reengage teachers who don’t activate and help them along with their first project.

So what’s next?

This redesign provided a foundation for us to make an even bigger impact on activation rate and to improve the experience for our teachers. In addition to continuing to refine the messaging and timing of the reengagement emails, we’re already hard at work at improving the stickier parts of the project creation flow. And of course, this focus on activation rate is all in service of our mission and making sure that as many teachers as possible have access to the tools and experiences they need to provide a great education.