Creating Quick-Entry Mobile Donations

Project Goals

For years our nonprofit clients have been asking for a mobile way to process donations from constituents while on-site at events or meetings. Current credit card swiper technology made it difficult to find a way to process and track those donations without importing it from another system such as Square, where the data was incomplete. My goal was to find a way to process those payments and collect data natively without the extra step of reconciliation with a third party.

Research

I diagrammed general processes for point of sale systems and compared them with our typical donation entry in our CRM. The main challenge was determining how to incorporate a step for account creation. Our CRM must associate each transaction with a donor account within the system. Many point of sale systems record the transaction only; however, we did not want to create blank or duplicate accounts during the donation process.

I needed to design this feature as part of our mobile app, which works through our API so I examined which methods were available for implementation.


Work Flow and Wireframes

I alleviated the trouble of account creation by minimizing the number of fields required to create an account and by automatically searching for matching accounts as the name was entered.

I also found inspiration in the IOS documentation where I saw Safari natively includes credit card entry through the camera. If Apple could input credit card information without a swiper, so could we, removing the need for external hardware.


Prototyping and User Testing

I added the wireframes I created in Balsamiq to Invision to make a navigable mockup. This helped to test and solidify workflow and gain stakeholder approval of the proposed addition before building the changes. Once the changes were complete, I further Q&A tested in TestFlight to confirm that the workflow was as proposed.

Results

We made this feature available to thousands of nonprofit clients. App downloads have increased as nonprofits find they can accept donations at prospect meetings, raffles, and events without creating duplicate accounts for their regular donors. Their donor's contribution is automatically linked to their existing prospect account without any extra effort from the database administrator.

Find the app in the Apple Store here.

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