SUMMARY:

Street Cards is a non-profit that serves those experiencing homelessness and those in need. The main conduit for this outreach is Donation Day events in which one "Street Team" locates individuals who need help and asks them what clothing or food items they need. This list is then transmitted to a "Shopping Team" located at a nearby store who purchases the items and delivers them back to the person in need. As they wait for the items, the Street team asks permission to take photos and videos of the individual telling their story. This serves the dual purpose of giving the person some humanizing interaction, while also recording media that can be used to show donors exactly who was helped and how, as well as creating future awareness.

After holding stakeholder interviews and gathering generative research data by conducting our own Donation Day, my team developed a two-phased approach to helping Street Cards, with us each choosing an individual area of focus. The first step consisted of steps that could be immediately taken by the organization to better align their current resources. For the second we created a multi-touchpoint digital toolset that could be used to more efficiently perform their Donation Day events.

CURRENT STATE:

We sat down with Street Cards founder Andrea Bert to get a better understanding of where Street Cards was and where they were heading. We learned that despite being a somewhat young non-profit, they had established a solid foundation and where aiming to increase their outreach efforts in 2020.

EXPLORATORY RESEARCH:

Because the key area of focus for our suggestions was Donation Day outreach events, we decided the best way for us to understand how to improve the planning, execution, and wrapup of an event would be to perform our own. The Street Team headed to the Salvation Army Harbor Lights Shelter in Minneapolis while the Shopping Team went to a nearby Target to await instructions.

Donation Day event

Once my team had a better idea of how Street Cards operated currently, both on a higher organizational level as well as on a more tactical level during a Donation Day Events, we divided our efforts in order to come up with a multi-faceted approach to assisting the non-profit. 

While looking through the organization's founding documents, I had latched onto a particular quote in their mission statement. It stated that one of their goals was:

During our conversations with Andrea, she had explained Street Cards had only executed a handful of Donation Days in the prior year. The reason for this was due to their limited resources and the fact that they must take a hands-on approach to organize and execute each event.

In light of this, I decided to make my individual focus designing adaptable and scalable systems for Street Cards that could be used by outside organizations to leverage their own networks and conduct their own Donation Days. During my research, I learned that this is an approach used by many non-profits. To better understand how this is accomplished, I conducted a comparative analysis of several organizations that do this successfully.

This investigation made clear that the approach utilized by Best Christmas Ever (BCE), an organization that during the Holiday season assists families who have fallen on hard times, be the most applicable for Street Cards. This decision was reinforced during conversations with Street Card stakeholders in which I learned that BCE was a non-profit they followed closely and whose practices they aspired to reproduce.

In order to get a firmer grasp for how BCE had successfully created a framework that could be used by outside organizations to perform charitable outreach, I examined their onboarding materials, learned more about the tools they provided to others, and interviewed members of outside organizations who had used the BCE system to aid families in their communities. In doing so I identified a number of critical aspects to their success:

BCE KEYS TO SUCCESS:

Empowering a member of the outside organization, or "captain" to spearhead the planning and execution of an outreach event

Giving detailed descriptions, timelines, and scripts for performing all the functions necessary for conducting a successful event

Providing an easy to use fundraising platform that can be used to fully leverage the outside organizations network 

Because one key to Best Christmas Ever's approach is the role of the captain; the member of the outside organization who takes on the primary responsibility of planning, organizing, and executing an outreach event, I decided that this individual would be the primary user of the systems and tools I would create.

In order to better understand and empathize with this individual, I created a persona for the type of individual who might typically fill this role. It was a composite of the Street Cards and Best Christmas Ever stakeholders and adopters I had interviewed.

PHASE ONE - ANALOG TOOLS:

My primary deliverable for phase one was a "Captain's Packet" that contained all of the information an individual would need to quickly learn how to conduct a successful Donation Day. It included an agreement requiring adherence to outlined best practices, tips for fundraising, suggestions for utilizing email and social media to promote awareness for their event, detailed steps for performing a successful Donation Day, as well as other training materials.

Donation Day experience map

KEY FUNCTIONS:

Allow for the creation and scheduling of Donation Day events

Monitor the process of people volunteering to fill roles and add teams as needed

View the progress of fundraising efforts towards designated financial targets

Include a digital version of the Captain's Packet

Provide timely prompts on when and how to reach out to internal and external networks

Facilitate the collection and submission of media and documents produced during the event

I then sketched a dashboard that contained the neccesary interfaces to provide this information and features.

captains portal sketches

After checking in with my two teammates who were designing the corresponding mobile application to confirm that our inputs and outputs were in alignment, I digitized my designs in Sketch.

wireframes in sketch

CLIENT CHECK-IN:

Before proceeding, my team and I met with Street Card's founder Andrea Bert once again to confirm that our efforts were aligned with the organization's needs and no details had been overlooked. After receiving the go-ahead from her, I created an interactive version of my prototype using InVision.

My team and I presented our designs and recommendations for the Street Cards organization. Taken together they represent a comprehensive approach to streamline their message and increase awareness, better utilize their fundraising platform, create scalable and adoptable systems and tools, utilize a volunteer mobile application to more efficiently conduct Donation Day events, and improve their record-keeping and impact reporting.

MOVING FORWARD:

The digital components of this project are scheduled to be taken up and built by a team of developers. I look forward to consulting with them as they build tools to assist the Street Cards organization move to forward in a way that helps them realize their goals of serving those experiencing homelessness and those in need on a mass scale by leveraging the generosity of many outside organizations in multiple geographic locations.

OTHER WORK: