Grow membership and donor base for Bainbridge island museum of art

Capstone project, User Experience certificate program

Overview
Bainbridge Island Museum of Art wanted a proposal on how to increase their membership, and donor base.

Problem
Museum leadership needed a way to collect information from patrons for marketing purposes to augment their online membership sign up experience.

BIMA leadership, and docents (greeters) had concerns museum-goers might be hesitant to provide their contact information. But leadership needed a way to collect this information for their marketing efforts to increase membership, and their donor base.

Research Goals
Here’s what we wanted to learn…

  • Is there sufficient communication to patrons on how to become a member, and donate?

  • Will patrons feel comfortable providing information to BIMA?

  • Increase donor base

Approach

  • User interviews

  • User testing

  • Competitive research

 
 

Findings

  • Admins used spreadsheets to manage the process, very manual

  • The process took 4-6 weeks for approval

  • Other groups were involved in the approval process (adding time)

  • Users were taken to the submission form without being qualified

  • The form was confusing, and didn’t provide helpful user feedback

  • Users weren’t able to get status updates easily

  • Corrections had to be made by admins, not users

 
 

Realigned goal
The initial goal was to provide a self-serve solution, but this would require more time and resources. So this iteration focused on solutions the team could deliver. We focused on providing users with information that would qualify them to submit a request properly.

  • Create a screen before the form that provided qualifying information

  • Optimize the submission form to reduce confusion, and reduce errors

  • Provide better, timely status to users waiting for approval

 
 

Results

  • The new home page would help qualify users so fewer mistakes were made during the submission process, and caught down stream. It also helped users feel more confident about submitting a request

  • Implementing form best practices enabled users to understand which fields were required reducing confusion, and mistakes

  • Allowing users to check status on their own gave them more timely information about the request, and more control of the submission process. It also freed admins from having to process status requests form users, and reallocate that time to other responsibilities.

Thoughts

Though we had to realign our goal based on constraints, we made improvements to the process that would have a positive impact on business, and users.