Persona 01
Consistent.
Donating is routine, part of the monthly outgoings, budgeted or not.
habitual
budgeted
monthly
DonateHello
80% of usability testers mistook DonateHello for a personal fundraising site. We rebuilt its identity around the fix, and the corrected MVP won over investors in its raise.
nonprofit tech
·
mobile app
·
mvp development
At a glance
From an untested concept to an investor-ready MVP.
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RESEARCH
7 interviews
4 donors, 3 nonprofit staff
benchmark
9 platforms
Scored on 10 dimensions
testing
5 sessions
Every finding shipped as a fix
output
1 MVP
Design system + front-end build
The Client
Not a nonprofit. The infrastructure nonprofits run on.
donatehello · nonprofit tech
DonateHello is a donation platform built for nonprofits. Organizations list their causes on it, and donors discover, give, and track their impact through it.
That distinction sets the design bar. A donor on DonateHello makes two trust decisions at once: whether to trust the cause, and whether to trust the platform moving the money to it. The platform has to earn trust twice, once for itself and once for every organization it hosts. DonateHello arrived with a sharp point of view: beneficiaries receive 100% of the donation, and donor attribution quantifies each giver's share of the impact and credits it back to them.
10M+
Monthly active players
3
Distinct player segments
U.S.
New market entry
The Challenge
A startup betting on a premise no donor had ever tested.
DonateHello came to WANDR with a concept, a business model, and no evidence. Nearly 40% of donors do not fully trust nonprofits, and the platform's original answer to that, giving in cryptocurrency, was itself unproven.
Problem 01
Low trust, limited transparency.
Donors lacked visibility into where their money went. Without proof of impact or accountability, confidence eroded and willingness to give dropped. Trust markers existed, but read as supporting information rather than the core of the experience.
Problem 02
Poor discovery, emotional disconnect.
Donors met a flat list of causes with too little context to feel motivated by any of them. Functionally informative, emotionally cold. A donor who does not feel connected to a cause before being asked to give is a donor who does not give.
Problem 03
No feedback loop.
After donating, users received little to no update, tracking, or recognition. With no visible sense of impact, there was no incentive to return, no path to a recurring relationship, and no compounding value for the nonprofits on the platform.
Our Role
From concept to
investor-ready build.
01
Product strategy and positioning
02
UX audit of the concept and flows
03
User research, seven interviews across donors and nonprofit staff
04
Nine-platform competitive benchmark
05
UI/UX design across the donation, dashboard, and campaign surfaces
06
Five-session usability testing with documented iterations
07
Design system and reusable component library
08
Front-end development and WordPress CMS integration
Research
We tested it on real donors before we designed it.
WANDR ran seven scripted interviews over Zoom, four donors and three nonprofit staff, alongside a nine-platform benchmark scored on donor and nonprofit portals, e-commerce, impact reporting, and crypto payment. Asked what would earn their trust, donors converged on one thing: total visibility into how their money is spent.
01
crypto
The premise donors trusted least.
All four donors interviewed hesitated on crypto. Some saw it as an investment rather than disposable income; one would give only if it converted to cash immediately, because volatility meant his gift could arrive worth less than intended. DonateHello's stated differentiator was the thing donors were most wary of.
02
GIVING
Donors give on triggers, not on plans.
Giving was rarely deliberate. It was set off by spare cash on a weeknight, by religious obligation, or by a piece of content that landed. One donor gave because something on a website reminded him of his grandmother. Emotional media is the trigger, not decoration.
03
BENCHMARK
Structured teardown of MPL's existing site.
Nine platforms including GoFundMe, Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and Cuddly were scored across ten capability dimensions, from proof of impact to crypto payment, to find the white space DonateHello could own.
3 ways to give, none the same.
Persona 02
Sporadic.
Open to giving but without the habit. A trigger sparks it, news or a link from a friend.
Trigger-led
occasional
news-driven
Persona 03
Cause-driven
Bound to one cause, usually personal. Giving is remembrance as much as generosity.
ONE CAUSE
PERSONAL
LOYAL
Reframe giving from a transaction into a relationship.
3 Principles →
Principle 01Trust
01
Discover.
Lead with connection, not a catalog. A structured but flexible system lets donors search, filter, and explore causes by their own values, interests, and urgency, so they arrive at the giving decision already invested.
Principle 02Segment
02
Trust.
Make transparency the product, not a page. Verified profiles, real-time tracking, clear fund breakdowns, and donor attribution were embedded across the journey and surfaced as first-class features, shifting donors from blind giving to informed participation.
Principle 03Bingo
03
Flow
Strip the giving flow to essentials. Because research showed donors give on emotional triggers, engaging media was pulled above the fold, and an e-commerce-inspired “Most Needed” model let donors fund specific items a cause needs, add them to a cart, and check out.
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THE KEY INSIGHT
The riskiest thing wasn't the design. It was the premise.
DonateHello did not hire us to question its business model. It hired us to design one. But research kept returning the same signal: the crypto-first premise the company was built on was the single thing donors trusted least, while transparency, which the founders treated as a supporting feature, was the entire reason a donor would give. Redesigning the screens would have produced a prettier version of the wrong product. Testing the premise is what let the MVP lead with the thing donors actually wanted, and that is the version investors backed.
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Outcomes
What the testing caught.
Five usability sessions turned a set of assumptions into an MVP with a corrected identity, a defensible model, and a story investors could follow.
01 · Identity
80%
Testers who misread the product, fixed before build nonprofit branding added
(4 of 5)
(4 of 5)
02 · Model
100%
Testers who rejected the default 18% tip revenue risk caught pre-launch (5 of 5)
03 · Direction
1 of 9
The only platform positioned to lead on transparency, not crypto repositioned into the white space the benchmark exposed
04 · Readiness
0 → 1
Concept to investor-ready MVP
resonated immediately in the raise
resonated immediately in the raise
Figures are from WANDR's five-session usability study and seven research interviews, 2021. Percentages are shown with raw counts. No post-launch business metrics exist for this MVP engagement.
Client Voice
In their words.
“
Working with WANDR changed how we think about product design entirely. They didn't just execute on what we asked for, they pushed our thinking further than we expected and brought a perspective we didn't know we were missing. The result was a product experience that resonated immediately with our investors.
Abraham Gomez
Co-Founder, DonateHello
