Nurturing Nalam - Coding Queens

The problem we were trying to solve

Nalan is a non-profit dedicated to empowering vulnerable girls in South India. The organization is in the process of scaling globally and automating the fundraising flow. We chose to challenge ourselves with the question “How might we drive donor engagement through storytelling?”

We started by analysing our competitors through NGO’s websites that are fundraising to empower and help the children and youth in underprivileged areas of the world. We wanted to discover what stories they are trying to tell and how.

The insight we came up with during this phase was that the majority of the other non-profits' approach to create empathy in donors lacked privacy and respect to children and their culture. In some websites we found that the pages that displayed images of the children, stand out.

Our revised problem statement that derived from this insight was: “How might we drive donor engagement through storytelling while respecting the children and their culture?”

Ideation

Through a brainstorming session we came up with the idea of adding a cultural aspect to Nalam’s website by taking advantage of the Diwali holiday and the assumption that people feel more giving during holidays , as a way to increase acquisition of potential donors and retention of recurring donors. In addition, we decided to add a ‘chat bot’ feature portraying one of the girls with an added text that is supposedly telling her story. (Fun fact; we found out that Diwali is being celebrated all around the world today!)

Solution

Our solution provides users with a deeper understanding of the girls' lives, fostering empathy.

What it does

Upon entering the homepage, users encounter a slideshow containing the mission, Diwali trivia, and a brief description. Two buttons facilitate easy navigation to various donation options, with hovering over each option revealing the respective amounts.

How we built it

Utilizing Figma for the prototype's initial stages and future development, we employed the React framework to build the site.

Challenges we ran into

Linking the button to the donation page
Adjusting spacing for nav bar links
Lack of user insights, quantitative data, and user validation

What we learned

Strong MVP > Having a bunch of features Having a targeted objective helped our team stay on track with the competition brief and accomplish our goals within the tight timeframe.
Good designs are backend by research Even if it's a quick Google search, every design decision needs to have a logical reasoning behind it. The more proof, the better.
User experience first, then aesthetics It was difficult trying not to be pixel-perfect, but we figured a cherry on top of a bad cake doesn't change the fact that it will still be a bad cake.
We deep dived into the React framework, GitHub, and the stages of development. In addition, we were able to solve a problem from a UX/UI and product manager prospective.