We found the match!
After our first round of concept testing, we began synthesizing the feedback that we got on all our diverse concepts. While synthesizing, there was a lot of overlap in the overall feedback on each concept. This helped us narrow down on a concept that generally received the most number of positive responses. And here’s presenting our even more narrowed scope for the final solution: a matchmaking tracker for connecting donors to nonprofits and grants that support current community needs.
A tracker like this would allow Donor Services Officers (DSOs) to seamlessly make meaningful matches between donors and declined grants, and help break down silos to smoothen the internal processes further. A tracker like this aligns perfectly well with the initial project brief in January, where the broader goal was to design for responsible philanthropy. Next, we went back to the drawing board to ideate user flows of how DSOs and Program Officers at TPF would interact with a matchmaking tracker. This allowed us to think about the features and interfaces involved at each step of this process, as well as the possibility of multiple entry points for using this tracker. We used these user flows to prioritize features that had significant overlap across all of our designs. Following which each of us continued with creating low-to-mid-fidelity prototypes of different screens that DSOs/Program Officers would potentially have to interact with if they used this tracker. Each of our designs focused on a particular feature from the prioritized list, as well as we explored designing for both a mobile view and a desktop-based application for the same feature.
We then went on to develop scenarios based on the features we wanted to test with DSOs. These scenarios were hypothetical situations that the DSOs would find themselves in when they could be interacting with the matchmaking tracker. One such scenario was about asking the DSOs to imagine getting donors to partially fund a grant and then them having to reach out to other donors to get more funding for the same grant and looking at the progress that that grant has made. Testing out these scenarios also helped us understand whether they resonated with the DSOs or if they already face such situations in their daily workflow.
For this round of concept testing, we wanted to prioritize the DSO-facing functions of the matchmaking tracker tool for future prototypes. We did so by getting feedback from the DSOs on which scenarios resonated most as well as which features they would most likely use. We were also testing which stylistic layouts were preferred over others, as well as whether they preferred a desktop version or mobile version of the same feature.
In parallel, we tested features and flows specific to the Program side with Program Officers at TPF to better understand how a tool like this would help streamline the process of handing off grants to the DSOs.
And to determine how our tool could fit in at other community foundations, we spoke to representatives from community foundations across the country. We asked these representatives for feedback on some of our designs, and we also discussed the ways in which their foundations approach matchmaking. The feedback from external community foundations is essential to our project, to ensure we are getting a fresh perspective on our concepts and that our design could inspire a better process for matchmaking among different community foundations across the country.
For our next sprint, we are looking forward to synthesizing the results from this round of concept testing and beginning to develop a more unified, fleshed-out version of the matchmaking tracker. We also plan to dive into the technical aspects of our tool and explore the ways in which it could be implemented with The Pittsburgh Foundation’s existing systems.
“You rarely have time for everything you want in this life, so you need to make choices. And hopefully, your choices can come from a deep sense of who you are.” — Fred Rogers
