From Clutter to Compassion — Empowering Donors

a Vinnies case study

Background

St. Vincent de Paul (known as Vinnies) helps communities by collecting and selling donations to fund social causes. They strive to positively impact lives and communities through its diverse range of programs, initiatives, and op shops across Australia.

The Problem

Fast fashion is one of the highest causes of pollution, creating 10% of global CO2 emissions. Not only does the production of fast fashion cause pollution, but also the significant amount of consumers who purchase then donate fast fashion items due to the quick turnover of trends. These items are illegally dumped around op shops and bins, costing charities $5.6 million a year to dispose.

The Opportunity

Consumers are gaining awareness of the environmental impacts of fast fashion and Vinnies can see this through an increase in donations of such items. This presents an opportunity for Vinnies to educate others about their initiatives and encourage higher quality donations to ultimately increase their sales.

The Solution

My goal was to empower users by involving them in the donation process, while also supporting Vinnies in their mission to raise awareness about their causes.

This resulted in a Vinnies web app, enabling users to earn points through donating unwanted items. These points can then be allocated towards causes that resonate with users, offering them a tangible way to see how their donations can help others.

My roles: Market research, user research and synthesis, ideation, usability testing, wire-framing & prototyping

Timeline: 4 weeks (6 Nov 2023–2 Dec 2023)

Team members: Jeff Clarke, Nicholas Sangster

Method: Double Diamond — Discover, Define, Design and Deliver.

Discover

Understanding the Market

Even with the increase of resale sites such as Depop, Facebook Marketplace, Ebay, and Etsy, most second hand shoppers still purchase from op shops. However, there are other big charities out there that share similar goals and also strive to make a positive impact through their initiatives, creating a competitive landscape within the charity sector.

Competitor Comparator Analysis

In order to understand Vinnies’ market position, we created a table of pluses and deltas for each competitor and comparator.

Salvos, Red Cross, Savers and Life Blood, displayed their initiatives in digestible and linear formats. They included educational segments about donating benefits and tips for decluttering.

Content on Lifeblood is organised with a linear structure

On the other hand we found that the Vinnies website hosts a wealth of content, although it is inundated with clutter and densely organised, which makes it challenging to locate information about causes, donation benefits or what specific stores accept as donations.

Format of content on the Vinnies website is densely organised

Mapping our Assumptions

Now that we were aware of the gaps, we had some assumptions of what users may think when visiting the Vinnies website.

Our assumptions were mapped out into a graph and we wanted to focus on the ‘important unknowns’ quadrant as these elements directly relate to the business goals of increasing awareness and can be validated through research.

We wanted to validate the following:

1. People don’t know how their donations benefit others
2. People want to be educated on the benefits of donating
3. People don’t know what they can donate

User Research

To test our assumptions, we needed to gain a deep understanding of people’s donation and purchasing behaviours.

Research Goals:

• To understand how people donate items, when, to whom and the reasons why
• To understand second hand purchasing habits
• To discover frustrations of donating or purchasing second hand

Target Audience

As our research goals were broad, we maintained a broad target audience to gain insights into charitable behaviours from different perspectives.

• People who donate in general (clothes/time/money etc.)
• People who purchase second-hand from charities

Research Methods

To narrow down underlying behaviours and motivations of buying and shopping at charities, we carried out in-depth user interviews. Seventeen interviewees were recruited through friends/family and social media forums.

Define

User Research Synthesis

My team and I spent a significant amount of time mapping out our user insights into an affinity map. The biggest trends that emerged was that most people donate to charities to:

1. Declutter

2. To help others

Other interesting trends highlighted negative perceptions of charities or a reluctance in understanding the effects of donations:

1. Doesn’t trust big charities
2. Doesn’t research before donating
3. Doesn’t track the impact of donations
4. Doesn’t communicate with charities

These findings validated our assumptions that people want to know the benefits of donating, however we now see that the reasons for inaction may be due to a lack of trust.

Understanding our Insights

We began to map out some experiences that our persona may face during the donation process to gain a better understanding of who our persona might be.

Persona

Clear behaviours, needs and goals emerged which lead to the creation of our persona, Clare.

A summary of Clare:

1. She declutters seasonally by donating her unwanted items to her nearest charity
2. She wants to help others by donating and needs to know how her donations impact others
3. She is frustrated by a lack of transparency from charities regarding the impact of donations

Problem Statements

As a team, we brainstormed ten problem statements, highlighted the one we believed was best, and explained why we thought so to the group.

The statements that we agreed on mostly concerned charity trust and reassurance. For example:

1. Clare needs to be able to trust organisations because she is often decluttering and donating unwanted items
2. Clare needs more transparency around the donation process because she doesn’t trust charity organisations

However, as we tried to come up with HMWs for these problem statements, it occurred to us that donation transparency and building trust around charities may pose a significant challenge.

How do you even measure trust?

Being largely subjective, trust would require a lot more research in order to understand the reasons why there is charity distrust in the first place or what trust actually means to each user.

Considering the time constraints, we opted to designate the concept of ‘trust’ as a priority for our next steps instead of an immediate concern.

We went back to our existing persona to see if we could simplify the problem statement while still keeping it true to Clare’s needs of decluttering and wanting to help others.

The final problem statement that we thought best captured Clare was:

Clare needs to know how charities use her donations because she wants to help others by donating unwanted items.

How Might We’s (HMW)

We found our collaboration method of brainstorming on our own and deliberating as a team to make decisions to be quite effective, and we continued to do the same for our HMWs.

Two HMW statements we thought best addressed our problem statement were:

1. HMW motivate Clare to be less apathetic about donating
2. HMW inform Clare how charities use her donations to impact others

We wanted to ideate on both statements to see which resulted in solutions that would be viable for the business and attractive to Clare. But first, we had to speak to some stakeholders to understand how the business operates and their pain points, if any.

Design

To the Source

In order to ideate on our HMW’s we needed to better understand our stakeholders to ensure our solution could also benefit the business. We visited Vinnies stores and local charities to do conduct contextual inquiries and held five stakeholder interviews with members of staff.

Research goals:

• How charities operate and support communities
• How the business makes decisions around donations and selling

Key Insights:

1. People often complained about the cost of the items for sale — indicating they did not understand/know that proceeds help to fund community causes
2. Most people are educated about Vinnie’s initiatives through in-store signage
3. A large majority of charity store workers are volunteers who are retired

From these insights, we understood that our solution needed to:

• Be straightforward enough for Vinnies staff to grasp
• Have some sort of educational component about Vinnies’ community impact

Ideation

Armed with our market research, user and stakeholder insights, and persona we proceeded with our ideation using Crazy 8’s for both HMW statements.

1. HMW motivate Clare to be less apathetic about donating

Ideas:

• Focus on the local impact to motivate Clare
• Gamify the system and move up a level with each donation
• Allocate donations to families/people in need and track the progress

However, looking back at our research, the trait of apathy was not true to our persona and problem statement as Clare is fundamentally concerned about the impact and wants to help others with her donations. This HMW was therefore disqualified and we moved on to our next statement.

Get Donnafeng’s stories in your inbox

Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.

Remember me for faster sign in

2. HMW inform Clare about how charities use her donations to impact others?

Ideas:

• QR code scan to register an account and receive notifications about community or store needs
• Offer opportunities to donate to specific causes
• Tracking of donations

Our Initial Idea — Task Flow

I created a task flow to get a picture of how the user journey would look.

Even though building ‘trust’ was not a priority at this point, we still wanted to create transparency and remind people that Vinnies is a charity that requires funds to operate. Thus, we thought allocating 50% of the points to Vinnies could help them fund overhead costs or causes with high priorities.

Behaviour Philosophy — BJ Fogg

Before we ideated further we had a look at BJ Fogg’s behaviour model to see whether the solution for our persona could align with his philosophy:

In order for a behaviour to occur, there needs to be sufficient motivation, ability and a trigger.

• Motivation: Clare is already inclined to donate to help others, thus demonstrating motivation
• Ability: Clare has the ability to donate clothes to her local Vinnies
• Trigger: When prompted to collect and allocate points through the app which includes information about how she can help, this will trigger an increase in donation behaviour and ultimately increase donations and sales for Vinnies

Where would we sit?

We decided that our product should be a web app for the following reasons:

1. To remain cost effective
2. To be time effective so users do not have to go through the process of entering a different website or downloading an app

We moved some features of the Vinnies site around to visualise what our web-app would look like in a live environment.

We named it ‘MyVinnies’ as a placeholder however it stuck because it conveyed the sense of personal touch that we wanted the donation experience to be associated with.

Drawing Out the Idea

We drew inspiration from the existing Vinnies site and looked at best practice for UI from Dribble designs.

The New Flow

We liked the idea of a QR code scan as it is simple enough for store staff to implement and for the user to quickly log in or collect points.

1. Scan store QR code
2. Create account/log in
3. Scan 2nd QR code to collect 50 points
4. 25 points is allocated to Vinnies
5. User allocates other 25 points to chosen causes within 48 hours — shown via a countdown timer to create urgency
6. View donation history

Team Pain Points and Solutions

Pain Point 1: We imagined people scanning 50 points into their account, then seeing that they can only allocate 25 points would be a confusing process

Solution: Added fund allocation pie graph for transparency, inspired by World Vision as an alternative to splitting points

Pain Point 2: 50 points per donation didn’t seem like a substantial number and was difficult to divide between causes

Solution: Set default donation points to 100

First Prototype

Usability tests — Metrics to measure:

• Quantitative: The time it takes users to create a My Vinnies account and allocate 25 points to each cause
• Qualitative: To understand the user’s experience through a series of follow up questions

We tested our first prototype on three users. All users spent an average of two and a half minutes to complete the task.

Pain Points and Solutions

Pain point 1: Confused if they had to create an account or sign in

Solution: Change flow to first time user perspective and only allow create account

Pain point 2: We entered 300 points in the ‘Donations’ page to indicate that it’s showing a lifetime accruement of points, but this confused users as they were under the impression that the’ve only just scanned their first donations in

Solution: Change points on ‘Donations’ page to points that were just collected — 100 points

Pain point 3: Confused about language of ‘Your Donations Have Earned’ — it sounds like these points are from the current donation

Solution: Changed to ‘My Vinnies Points History’

Second Prototype

With the changes implemented from our first round of tests, we did a second round with six users who completed the task with an average of two minutes and fifteen seconds.

Pain Points and Solutions

Pain point 1: Users felt there should be an introduction to the app as they were not sure what to expect when creating an account

Solution: Created an onboarding pop-up with introduction once ‘Create Account’ is clicked

Pain point 2: Users felt there should be more information about My Vinnies at the stores

Solution: Even though this could be perceived as personal opinion, we proceeded with the idea of adding signage and placing the QR code on it as this aligned with our:

• Stakeholder research: Vinnies customers are usually only educated about initiatives from store signage
• Persona behaviours: Clare chooses the most convenient way to donate and being able to scan the QR code straight away and save her time in the donation process

Store signage mock-up by Jeff Clarke

Deliver

Content and Design System

Vinnies has well-established branding so we did not want to stray too far from the existing website design. We kept the iconic blue and yellow colour scheme, and kept the typography simple and informal. This design system extended into our store signage for a cohesive omni-channel experience.

Counter signage mock-up created by Jeff Clarke

The Final Prototype

Reflecting on the Problem

We aimed to help Vinnies achieve their goal of educating people about their community initiatives and encourage the donation of higher quality items. To achieve this, we wanted to empower users by engaging them in the donation process, while simultaneously helping Vinnies to promote awareness about their causes.

How we achieved this

• Providing users with a sense of accomplishment with encouraging language and ability to earn points from donations

• Our market research showed that information on Vinnies website is cluttered and important information is hard to locate — We showcased educational content that is relevant to the user in a digestible format

• Empower users to take ownership in the donation process by showing tangible results of their donations and allowing them to track the causes they contributed to
• Users can also share their progress and their donations via a social sharing button to encourage others to donate

View Interactive Prototype

Next Steps

Building Trust

• There is opportunity to increase donations or sales through building trust
• This could be achieved through more rounds of user research to gain insights of what trust means to them and the true reasons for lack of trust

Measure Success

• Measure the number of My Vinnies accounts created, frequency of donations and the number of causes that donation points were allocated to through the web app
• Measure the revenue generated from donations that are registered through the My Vinnies web app
• Gauge user satisfaction of the points allocation and tracking process through website ratings and feedback request

Reflection

As a group, we embraced transparent communication and encouraged collaboration with each decision. All members were encouraging and thought about every angle to ensure each decision aligned with the project brief and with our research. I thank Jeff and Nick for a wonderful project experience.

Key Learnings

• A democratic approach to decision making fosters trust within the team for members to feel heard before a final decision is made
• Creating a timeline with space for ample user research was imperative for us to gain deeper insights and synthesise our findings without rushing
• Having a diverse team with varying expertise will be a benefit for leveraging each skill in the process