Out of the Box, Into a New Scope
After a (very, very) brief break, the Pittsburgh Foundation Capstone Team is back for the summer semester! We are excited to pick up where we left off at the end of the spring semester. Our clients kindly asked us to give a slightly pared-down version of our Spring Presentation at TPF’s quarterly committee meeting, and our team jumped at the opportunity! Presenting our research findings and discussing our focus for the summer was a great way to refresh our excitement for the work ahead. (For a refresher on our work from last semester, our website is now live!)
As we transition into Phase II of our project (the “design the thing right” phase of the Design Council’s Double Diamond model), we look to our newly defined problem as a guide while we explore and develop different ideas for our solution: How might we more effectively capture, assess, and leverage donor information, so that TPF is equipped to simultaneously increase the personalization of their donor services while improving donor matching?
Since we decided to narrow our scope towards creating an internal tool that will help The Pittsburgh Foundation more effectively utilize their data collected during personal donor interactions, we wanted to get an even more comprehensive view of the current donor services processes. We spoke to each Donor Services Representative at TPF individually, to gain insight into the similarities and differences across their methods of working with their assigned group of donors. Through an extensive interpretation session, we put together our findings into journey maps, to better understand the DSO’s actions and uncover the common pain points across all of the DSO’s processes. The journey maps revealed that there are many leverage points across the journey in which our solution could make a big impact in helping DSOs. For example, we could try to create a tool that reduces the overhead of the DSOs work and free them up to foster communication with their donors.
Naturally, through looking at all of the opportunities that emerged from the journey maps, we began cultivating ideas for a potential solution. In order to get our ideas out of our heads and share them with each other, we started sketching! By starting with low fidelity sketches, we could extract just enough details from our ideas to be able to clearly communicate them with each other, without investing time delving into specifics. We wanted to challenge ourselves to think more “outside of the box” and come up with some more “out-there” (👽) ideas. Using the Worst Possible Idea technique, we explored bad solutions to our problem and then searched for the opposite of those ideas to come up with novel/crazier solutions. The sketches we started to collect took many forms, from hand drawn cartoons and user flows to simple digital wireframes and storyboards. When we came together to discuss our sketches, we found a wide range of ideas, but also noticed common themes and concepts, such as donor profiles and data entry assistants.
Through these sketches, we started to create a list of concepts to validate with our core user group (TPF DSOs), including a donor profile, a donor-to-grantee matchmaking tracker, and a DSO voice assistant. We built out the prototypes of our ideas a little further (mid-fi) in Figma, and compiled them together for concept testing! Using the prototypes as discussion points, we reviewed the concepts with 4 DSOs from TPF. We also reached out to donor-serving employees at other community foundations, to get some insight into other perspectives from the communal philanthropic space. Overall, we observed positive reactions across all of our prototypes, and while it’s awesome that our clients are excited with what we’ve come up with, it also positions us with a compelling challenge to narrow down our concepts.makes it more challenging for us to narrow down our concepts. So, for now, it’s back to the drawing board!
“Listening is where love begins: listening to ourselves and then to our neighbors.” — Fred Rogers
