A picture is worth more than a thousand words
How to convince people to go to a fundraiser? Party At The Piers at the Exploratorium.
Project Overview
Exploratorium
Time: 2 weeks
Role: Whole process
We were tasked with designing a digital experience for the Exploratorium’s biggest annual gala and fundraiser - Party At The Piers. It was a student project, completed 100% remotely in collaboration with 2 other UX Designers - Annika Bautista and Kimberly Bombita. It was a 2-week design sprint. I collaborated with my partners on almost every aspect of the project except the prototyping in Figma, which I completed almost all by myself.
How to convince people to attend a fundraiser?
The Problem
Party At The Piers is the Exploratorium’s biggest annual fundraiser. It is important from many standpoints. It provides a lot of necessary funding and increases awareness of and loyalty to the non-profit. It is a spectacular gala filled with thrilling performances and scientific demonstrations.
For this sprint we decided to figure out a way of attracting more people to attend the gala. We also wanted to improve the discoverability of the event and other Exploratorium events and help people get invested in its mission.
Show them they are going to have a good time
The solution
Showing the proof is a very effective way of convincing anyone that something is true. That’s the approach we took.
We decided to design a very graphic website that would help the users visualize how the party looks, by using pictures and videos from the previous galas.
We also wanted to help the users find information they are interested in, by organizing and prioritizing the content.
We also wanted to improve the discoverability of other events hosted by the Exploratorium by dedicating an easily-findable subpage dedicated just to them.
To even further increase the discoverability of future events we decided to prioritize the newsletter subscription and social media sharing.
The Process
Discover
Business analysis
Competitive analysis
Comparative analysis
Heuristic Evaluation
Usability Testing
Surveys
User research
User Interviews conducted via Zoom
Define
Affinity Mapping in Miro
Personas
Scenarios
Problem Statement
Design Hypothesis
Develop
Collaborative Design (Design Studio)
Sketches
Wireframing in Figma
Deliver
Wireframing in Figma
Prototyping in Figma
Usability Testing
But how did we get there?
Understanding the driving forces behind fundraisers
To better understand the problem, we needed to figure out why people come to fundraisers, what’s the driving force behind them. As many organizations throw a lot of fundraisers and that information is readily available online, we started by simply googling the relevant information.
It was really surprising, all the online sources listed “having fun” as the main user goal followed by “socializing”.
A fundraiser is just a big party
We decided to conduct a more in-depth survey to further validate our findings and to screen for potential people to interview. We needed to find more information and question people that have actually attended fundraisers in the past and find out more about their experience and reasons for going.
Why did you attend the fundraiser?
An insurmountable wall of text
So what’s the problem?
We conducted a heuristic evaluation of the current Party At The Piers website to better understand the problem with the current experience. We then asked 5 users to complete basic tasks - reserving a table and buying tickets.
We also interviewed them about their experience and how likely they were to attend the gala after visiting the website.
“What is this event?”
The results were unsurprising. People were confused. The website is full of unscannable text. There are no pictures and the checkout process is not very straightforward. It is not clear if you are buying tickets, tables or making a donation without attending.
The users wanted to get more information about the event and its purpose to decide if they would be interested in going.
They need help visualizing what the event is going to look like.
User interviews
Affinity Mapping
We conducted an affinity mapping to synthesize all of our user interviews information. This allowed us to come up with our persona - Goes With The Flow.
Goes With The Flow - Our persona
“I only attend an event if I feel that I'm supporting either my friends or a worthy cause”
Bio
Goes With The Flow likes to have fun and attend special events and usually goes with their friends or family
They hear about events from their friends or through social media
They are likely to donate to a fundraiser if they have a clear understanding of the cause and they feel like they made an impact
Goals
I want to have a good time
I want to socialize
I want to support a good cause
I want to learn
Needs
I need to be sure I will have a good time
I need to know where my money is going
I need all the information about the event and the cause
Frustrations
I am unsure if I want to go
I don’t know anything about this event
How might we fix this experience?
We realized that the main website is the problem. People certainly were having a great time at the party, but they needed a bit of convincing to actually attend.
Let’s investigate the competition!
Other non-profits
Before we started designing our own solutions we wanted to analyze the competitors and see if what they were doing is working. We conducted competitive analysis of a few non-profit organizations' websites that also try to persuade people to attend their events (Rainforest Alliance Gala, CalAcademy of Science, Headlands Center for the Arts).
We also conducted a comparative analysis of Patreon’s website. It’s a place where creators can share their content and connect with regular supporters.
Graphic content and clearly presented information
Results
What we found is that all of those places are very clear in providing their users with clear and concise information they are looking for.
By using a lot of pictures they help the guests visualize how the party looks like. They also showcase how the past events looked like.
They provide easy access to the information about their mission and the accomplishments they already achieved.
What really struck me is they all show a very clear path for the user to take to attend the event. And most of the information was conveyed in the form of big colorful pictures.
Our design
Show, don’t tell
We prioritized the use of pictures to help the guests visualize how the party looks like.
We also included the photos from the previous galas to further inform the users of the event.
Organize the content
We introduced secondary navigation to the website to help the guests easily navigate the content that they are interested in. It is attached to the top of the screen, showing the users which part of the website they are currently in.
We also prioritized the content our persona would be most interested in.
Help find other events
We introduced a separate page for all other events hosted by the Exploratorium to help the guests explore and discover new events.
We also introduced a newsletter and social media sharing to further improve their discoverability.
We decided to redesign the whole Party At The Piers website putting pressure on graphic content, information architecture, easy navigation and discoverability of other events.
We also introduced a more intuitive checkout process.
We believe that by implementing those changes the attendance for both Party At The Piers and other events hosted at the Exploratorium would noticeably increase.
Landing Page
Checkout
Subscription
Events subpage
It works!
Testing
We tested our design with 5 users and they were all able to complete the checkout process without any problems. They had no problems navigating the website in search for the event information. They were also able to find a newsletter and subscribe to it.
After user feedback we further iterated on our design and increased the fidelity to hi-fi.
Next steps and insights
I would love to test the prototype with a more specific user group, as we had a hard time finding them in such a short period of time. If we had more time it would be worth considering restructuring information architecture on the Exploratorium’s main website to further improve the discoverability of events straight from the main page.
Overall the project was very interesting, especially the aspect of collaborating fully remotely with 2 other designers. Finding a very specific user base proved to be very challenging and we were forced to compromise in that regard.