Using service design to improve the face-to-face fundraising process
Human connections and cooperation are the cornerstones of all societies on the planet. Through connections and cooperation, humans have overcome challenge after challenge on their path to modern societies today. Being social creatures, and having empathy, has made humans help each other in times of crisis, and has allowed us to prosper. Indeed, according to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the desire to help someone in need is a part of our very nature.
NGOs as a link to connect humanity
Many non-government organizations aim to bring help to the right people at the right time. Fundraising is an important way to not just gather more money, but also to raise people’s awareness of the various causes that non-government organizations support. Face-to-face fundraising is among the most efficient ways of recruiting sustainable help. This type of fundraising focuses on different projects, including the Covid-19 pandemic, natural disasters, and current war conflicts.
The nature of the problem
Each donor signs up for a recurring monthly donation through a face-to-face fundraiser. However, the story of maintaining every month’s donation varies from person to person. Donations are voluntary acts based on altruism, and they are dependent on awareness and willingness.
Many monthly donations that were signed up for through face-to-face fundraising get canceled for various reasons and at various points in time. These cancellations make a non-government organization’s funding less stable.
Implementing service design to improve the fundraising process
Service design has been innovative in changing the service industry for the better. Whether being used on old, well-established services, or new ones, it has the capacity to improve all of them. By simply putting the designer in the user’s shoes, and shifting the perspective, service design methods helped many organizations to discover their customer’s potential. Service design methods also have the capacity to improve the internal workings of service-providing organizations. The five famous essential steps are empathy, defining, ideating, prototyping, and testing.
The initial approach
At first, the researcher mapped out the entire process following five essential steps, with the starting point of collecting data from customers. The expected results purpose was to produce a list of ideas that would improve the face-to-face fundraising process. During the research process, service design methods and tools were used.
Narrowing the research area
Finding pain points at almost every step-in a given process is possible, especially in the face-to-face fundraising method. These pain points range from people who have never used monthly donation services, to customers who chose to cancel after some time of donation. It is more sustainable to focus on the later end of the process. Customers who agreed to sign up for monthly donations showed their interest in helping others. Those customers who cancel their monthly donations did not necessarily stop caring for others.
The purpose of the research is to find out why such cancellations happen and how to prevent them. One good way to conduct the research was by producing research questions and finding answers. The research questions should be detailed enough to prevent vague answers.
Conclusion
In the master’s thesis, understanding the root cause behind the donations is important; it is only a start of a longer process. Implementing design thinking and service design to the donation process involves different methods and tools to achieve the desired end results. For finding out both the reasons customers cancel their donations and also what should be done in order to change the situation different service design methods and tools were utilized, for example, a workshop, user persona mapping, customer journey, and service blueprint were important for the research. The author gained empathy from the customer’s point of view and co-created with the commissioner’s personnel to produce a list of ideas that aim to help improve the face-to-face fundraising process.
Sources
Photo: Joonas Brandt / Suomen Punainen Risti
To Thuy, L. (2023). Improving Conversion Rate in Face-to-Face Fundraise Using Service Design Methods – A case of The Finnish Red Cross. Master’s Thesis. Turku University of Applied Sciences.