Hillary for America iOS donation app prototype

I wanted to create an experience for myself and solve my own problem as an aspiring volunteer fundraiser for Hillary for America (HfA), the official Hillary Campaign).

(This was before Twitter and Square were the vendors for the Bernie Sanders campaign and other campaigns as mentioned here btw: http://techcrunch.com/2015/09/15/twitter-and-square-partner-to-create-another-way-to-throw-money-at-political-candidates/)

I identified a number of changes that I thought would help me meet and exceed my goals via online fundraising, whether it was for various the types of end-users, high-dollar donors who sought to ‘max-out’ (donate the maximum amount, $2700 federal law limitation) or low-dollar donors for many of my friends, women in tech.

While current online donation process targeting donors fundraising emails revert to a web donation page within the browser, for a long period of a time, this was non-responsive web design. Though there were recent changes to make the web experience more responsive, I believe that going native on mobile would optimize donations for the Presidential campaign attempting to raise a billion dollars.

Shortly after the campaign was announced and the online donation platform launched, the image of Hillary Clinton did not appear to be rendered correctly in tablet portrait. While this has been fixed recently, the same design problems remain.

One main problem is inefficiency of mobile donations. While the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) requires occupation and employer information (occnoe) for donations over a certain threshold, filling out a form this long would also detract away from users.

While I am unsure how the campaign specifically chose the specific donation amounts listed below, it does not seem to be an effective way to target low-dollar donors. The seemingly random donation amount of $20.16 references the Presidential election year 2016 during the year 2015. This coupled with all other amounts without cents has inconsistent branding. The donation amounts all the way up to $500 typically could easily be considered to target high dollar donors as opposed to low-dollar donors who would probably give no more than $100 by itself without purchasing any merchandise. The limit of $50,000 limit is also concerning (entering a minimum of $3 and a maximum of $50,000) as it is stated that donation amounts have a maximum amount of $2,700. This language was equally confusing to a low-dollar donor.

The gif below is an example proposing that if a user has ApplePay already, they would only need to enter in text fields of their occupation and employer, making the donation process a few clicks with a credit card via Wallet (formerly Apple Passbook).

User Stories: Campaign Supporters

In this design challenge, I propose several user stories in the form of a native mobile application to make mobile fundraising for HfA frictionless for both staff and donors (high-dollar and low-dollar) alike with various options.

-A non-mobile friendly giving experience for donors, volunteer fundraisers, and probably campaign finance staff.

-Fundraising web pages were and are still not targeted toward various users.

-Fundraising forms are long and tedious to fill out.

Currently, low dollar and high-dollar supporters alike receive automated emails from a general Hillary campaign and are restricted to a check-out experience on mobile web that fails to be efficient and is unable to reduce the number of fields that even high dollar donors themselves or their staff would need to enter.

I personally would want to avoid filling this out on a mobile device if I have an iPhone and Apple Pay. How many more times do I need to enter in my credit card? What if I want to make a repeat donation and fast after attending an event or donating a single $3 donation?

-Creating a mobile-friendly and easy giving experience.-Rebranding user experiences that tailor donor amounts for various users.-Maximizing efficiency and leveraging existing payment system like ApplePay across devices, including AppleWatch.

Most online fundraising for nonprofits (and yes, even political campaigns) are insufficient, old school, and quite frankly, ugly. The harder it is to donate online, or the bigger the eyesore, the more likely potential donors will grow impatient and distracted. Because of Apple Pay’s ability to minimize the number of fields needed to have entered by a user after having installed ApplePay, the giving experience is more efficient. ApplePay on iOS and web has proven to increase customer sales for merchants who have adopted it. In this example, I focus on iOS and WatchKit (though an enhanced responsive mobile front-end web experience could be possible via iPad).

User Stories: High-Dollar Donors (to come with code)

The above gif shows the high-dollar donor experience for attending an event with Hillary present (all max-out donors at $2700).

Native experience — Apple Watch, iPhone, iPad donation options (to come with code)

User Stories: Low-Dollar Donors (to come with code)

This is for anyone donating under$250.

-Storing the Data of Donors & How to pull data for Federal Elections Commission (FEC) Purposes

-Through donating via PassBook, whether on iPhone or AppleWatch (native mobile), or iPad (which can be adapted for front-end web), it is possible to be able to take in data for donors from all 50 states and pull this data for FEC reporting, right now I’m working with various things like Parse/Stripe to sort out what makes the most sense. I just know that old school vendors are not up to par with some of the latest technologies here in Silicon Valley (minus those that are directly affiliated with Twitter and Square to help develop their mobile fundraising software, which do amazing work).