CURE
Clean Up the River Environment (CURE) is a rural, nonprofit organization made up of people who care about the well-being of their neighbors, the health of the land and water, and the legacy we leave for future generations.
MY ROLE
UX Researcher | UX Designer | Digital Strategist
Overview
My team and I developed a digital strategy for CURE so that they could effectively engage younger audiences and inspire more people in their community to take action for causes that affect the daily lives of rural Minnesotans.
KEY DELIVERABLES
PROCESS WORK
METHODS
Stakeholder Interviews | Secondary Research | User Journey Mapping | Strategy Mapping | Multi Touchpoint Prototyping
TOOLS
Figma | FigJam | Google Docs | Google Sheets | Zoom | Slack | Whiteboard
Problem Statement
CURE is focused on improving the daily lives of rural Minnesotans. This organization paints a broad stroke and is aware of the interconnectedness of issues; i.e., they avoid simplicities and have a firm understanding of the deeper picture.
CURE advocates for climate, energy democracy, rural democracy (voting), water sustainability, and connecting with nature. They need a robust, sound digital strategy that will engage their rural constituents; specifically the Millennial and Gen Z generations.
CURE encourages constituents to take action. This information is not easily found and could be made more accessible for users.
CURE asked my team to develop a digital strategy that would bring more young people into the process and encourage them to join their “take action network.”
The CURE website has great information about how issues such as carbon pipelines affect rural Minnesotans.
Identify
Defining touchpoints
Before my team and I could recommend a new digital strategy to CURE stakeholders, we had to identify what issues currently existed with CURE’s strategy. My team and I did deep dive research in order to uncover initial problems and get a start on identifying possible touchpoints and solutions.
This is a snapshot of our deep dive research using a Figjam board. We discovered that CURE struggles to engage users on Facebook and their other social media platforms. This low user engagement is not great for inspiring action and change, especially when so many young people use social media to promote and find causes that they care about.
To get a better sense of the user journey, my team and I came together to create a digital touchpoint map. This map helped give us a better sense of the user’s journey and what we could recommend so that CURE could improve their digital strategy.
This is the whiteboard draft of our touchpoint map before we digitized it.
This is our digital touchpoint map that details the stages of the journey, user actions, user goals, digital touchpoints, user thoughts, and user feelings.
Taking action
Upon visiting CURE’s website, it is unclear how a user can get involved. This should be immediate and easily findable since it is so important to the organization’s mission and overall success.
My group and I agreed that one of the biggest issues with CURE’s current strategy was that it was too difficult for user’s to take action. From a user experience perspective, it does not make sense to make undue difficulties for the user. CURE as an organization relies on people taking action and fighting for the causes so it’s very important that they make it as user friendly as possible when someone is interested and wants to get involved. This ethos defined our project and was the most crucial recommendation that we made to CURE.
Prototype
My team and I were responsible for a developing prototypes based on the touchpoints that we had identified. I was responsible for advertising. To make sure that we were making requisite progress, we used a Kanban board and had daily morning and evening standups.
Our prototyping board in Figjam with our prototypes let us share our progress with the entire team.
This Kanban board, updated after our morning and evening standups, kept us organized as we each tackled different touchpoints.
My part
Since I was responsible for the advertising touchpoint, I thought it important to focus on ads that could let users take immediate action.
Secondary research led me to some interesting statistics that highlight how critical using digital platforms, such as Facebook and Google can be.
“98% of searchers click a result on page 1 of Google, making the Google ad grant a great way to drive more clicks (Nonprofits Source)”
My annotated wireframes show my recommendations and were presented to our client.
“84% of Facebook users share to show their support for a cause and highlight issues that are important to them (Nonprofits Source)”
Next Steps and Learnings
Nonprofits can face an uphill battle when trying to get people involved. However, with a good digital strategy, they can overcome some of these barriers and create a better user experience.
I wish that my team and I had more time to work on prototypes and could have developed the strategy in more depth. We were able to recommend immediate changes but this strategy will change over the next 5 to 10 years. This is a good start, but more progress can be made to encourage people to take action on these important issues.