Changes to Project Direction:

The original project direction focuses on increasing donor engagement with donation centres in need; we broaden the focus of this project from engagement to the motivation of donor behaviour, hoping to build a more equal community through interaction design. Although engagement is certainly a part of donor motivation, we thought that there was more aspects to motivation than simply engagement that we wanted to explore in our project.

Design Direction:

We will keep the overarching design direction from the original proposal: to create a personalized and engaging donation experience to motivate donor behaviour. We will focus our design efforts specifically on these two parts of the interface:

1. Donors’ Personal Profile
   1. We intend to explore ways to visualize and keep records of user donations, a method used a lot in helping form habitual behaviours. This could take the form of badges, leveling systems, etc.
   2. To encourage prosocial behaviour, we might incorporate records on common social media platforms, such as LinkedIn or Facebook – bringing direct, extrinsic rewards to donors for their donations.
2. Charity Profile
   1. Allow charities to specify donation goals for specific items (e.g. $100 towards purchasing 5 chickens for a village in Sudan).
   2. Provide updates on the impact of users’ donations (e.g. photos, graphs or statistics showing positive impact, etc.) to encourage long-term donation sustainability and donor engagement.
   3. For the two functionalities above, ensure that they are easy to use and efficient, enabling charitable organizations to add goals and provide updates in a timely manner.

In this project, we hope to evaluate this proposed system in terms of its effectiveness in motivating donor behaviour. These design directions are flexible and likely to change after conducting our field study, but in general the system will take on the form of a website or web application, as the platform is not critical to our objectives in this project.

Task Examples:

Task Example 1: Raymond

Raymond is an affluent board member of a real estate company. He generates considerable income every year. Feeling grateful and generous, he intends to donate some portion of his income to those that need it more. Most of Raymond’s donations go towards organizations he just so happened to stumble upon – for example, from street posters, or from social media content on the Internet. He finds it difficult to establish a long-term donor-to-donee relationship with these organizations, to see the results of his donations and the impact that it had. Occasionally, he visits the people he sponsors. However, as a busy man, Raymond doesn’t always have time to visit. He wishes that there was some way that he could keep up to date with how he can help, and how his contributions have made a difference to those in need.

Task Example 2: Bella

Bella is a 20-year-old college student. She is a very charitable person that has much concern about people who need help. The appreciation from people she helped also motivated her to help more of the others. She used to spare change to homeless people to help them get food. However, many news and studies showed that most homeless end up spending the money on narcotics and drugs. She felt conflicted as the way she contributed was surprisingly not her original intention. In this case, she changed her way of helping others; instead of sparing change to the homeless, she decided to donate money to charitable organizations. However, just like with her situation with the homeless, she struggles with who the money she donates to these organizations actually goes to, and whether or not it actually leads to a positive impact. As a result, Bella feels discouraged from donating money anymore.

Task Example 3: Steve

Steve has worked as a Donor Relations Coordinator for a charity for 3 years. His job is to be the main point of contact for most mainstream fundraising involving members of the public, to develop relationships with donors and to encourage them to donate. Recently, a news report showed that a number of charities were found to spend more than 80% of donations to the organization’s operating expenses. This has negatively affected the public’s motivation to donate. However, the charity that Steve is working for is a trustable organization. Since there has been a drastic decrease in donations for the charity, Steve’s manager asked him to think of solutions to increase donors’ confidence to the charity and encourage them to donate. Steve realizes that it would help if donations were made more transparent, and donors could see exactly how their money is being used to make an impact (instead of unrealistic amounts going towards operating expenses). He wishes that there was a system in place that would help improve transparency with the least amount of additional overload on their organizational practices, as their charity is already very overworked and busy.