Odyssey Fund
Simplifying the financial process in managing endowments and donations for non-profits.
Role
Product Designer
Team
2 Project Managers
4 Designers
Timeline
May 2024 - Dec 2024
SKill
Figma, 0-1 Product,
Client Relations
Summary
Currently, there are expensive software solutions for organizations who receive $100 Million+ in endowments, leaving smaller-scale organizations who generate around $1 Million+ to deal with tools that are tedious, time-consuming, and costly. To allow these organizations to save time and money to focus on furthering their mission, we created a free, open source, and secure endowment and customer management software to manage donation gifts.
Key features and Flows
Landing Page
Contributors Page
User Research
Looking into the Competitors
I studied competitor endowment management platforms and CRM (customer relationship management) platforms through guided demos and free trials to establish their purpose, strengths, and weaknesses.
I found that our competitors either specialized in endowments or in customer relations, but there was no perfect product to let users do both.
Why are users struggling?
We have completed all 5 interviews with endowment managers and donor managers at 5 different organizations. Their organizations ranged from small grassroots organizations to large, $100M+ endowment organizations. We organized our insights into the following affinity diagram:
Here are the main points that we gathered from the user research:
1
Importance of customizations in their management tools
2
Managing donors and finances are frustrating to do separately
3
There is a need for visualizations and reports of the funds’ performance
4
Exporting data is very important — generally liked CSVs
5
Users use multiple softwares to manage their finances which is laborious to sync
6
Users are most familiar with Excel (their current management tool)
Mapping Insights
Breaking it down
Because we had so many insights, we first divided the features into MVP (minimum viable product / originally on our PRD) features and features derived from our insights that we feel there is a need for through our user interviews.
PRD/MVP
- Dashboard
- Amount given by donors, what it’s dedicated towards, unitized value
- Activity
- Record of transactions including donations/endowments
- Store important documents in each transaction
- Data-inputting
- Able to integrate current endowments
- Able to add new donations
- Stewardship reports
- Able to send reports to donors
Reaches/Insights
- Donor profiles
- Individual information for each donor more visualized vs. just being able to search
- Enhanced customization
- Tags for configuring data table
- Add notes to specific donors
- Create email templates
- Write unitization features
- Visualizations/reports for summary
- Exporting pdf files of donor information
- Create quarterly finance reports/audits
- Donor categories (grouping households)
Associtaed Features
- Donor profile pages
- Communication + visualizations of giving
- Tags for data table
- Donation/fund group field (add groups for themselves)
- Dashboard with summary visualizations
- Data input (ability to add/import)
- Export option for data table and dashboard visualizations
- Quarterly reports/audits + donor reports
- Downloadable documents/receipt upload for each donation/endowment
Information Architecture
After going through many iterations, this is the most updated information architecture to navigate Odyssey Fund.
Low Fidelity Explorations
We explored some ideas in sketches, but tried to speed through this part of the process because we wanted to spend more time iterating in mid fidelities. Here are some of my personal sketches for our pages:
Dashboard provides an overview of users’ fund portfolio and contributors. Activity contains filters and a data table to show all the recent transactions that have been made.
Constituents and Funds were sketched by my teammates Sonia and Ashlie. Constituents show the profile and activity of an individual constituent. Funds shows all available funds + detailed information about each fund.
Medium Fidelity User FLows
I spent many weeks and iterations within mid fidelities. Here are some of our major user flows for the activity page that is still in development:
Adding a Transaction
Through this flow, users can manually add a recent transaction.
Customizing Tags
In this flow, users can rename the table columns and add/edit endowment names.
Redesign Process
But Wait! Scratch the Old
At this point, I had taken over last semester’s designs into the new semester to finalize the project. However, before I did that, I realized that our old designs had many problems.
We needed to fix all of these errors before iterating on our prototypes. Leading to a completely new product...
Additional Prototypes
Importing Data Table
Creating an Account
Next Steps
After finishing up the branding and the design system of Odyssey Fund, we will be able to push this startup project into developer's hands. I'm excited to see the launch of Odyssey and its projected reach of more than 10,000 nonprofits that can then manage finances with ease!
Takeaways
Effective teamwork > hours of unproductive design
We started this project by pairing designers on different pages but realized that each designer was lacking knowledge about other pages with incohesive designs. We design best when the whole team works on the pages together and voices out all of our opinions, driving our project’s progress much faster.
Making sacrifices for features
After affinity mapping the competitor research and user interviews, we found ourselves dealing with a lot of potential features. However, being limited by a time constraint, we needed to prioritize the most important flows and rationally sacrifice certain reaches (email templates, donor grouping, data input).
Last minute changes can happen
Halfway through high fidelity, we were told that there can be multiple contributors and there is no restrictions for endowments. This was a shock! We have always been under the assumption that funds were either restricted or unrestricted with singular contributors. This made us update our designs within a short amount of time.
HUddle
LePal Spirit