Crowdpac Product Design
A powerful platform for political change.
Redefining the Political Machine
In today’s America, big dollar donations drive the political machine, causing a vast over representation of wealthy interests in our electable offices. At Crowdpac, we believed that the government should represent what America truly is like and the best interests of us all. As a political fundraising platform, we allowed anyone, whether you’re already a candidate in a race, considering running for office, part of an organization, or even just a concerned citizen, to feel empowered to make a change and improve our shared government.
Unfortunately, the average American does not have the financial means to run for office, despite whatever their qualifications are. Oftentimes, politicians have powerful connections and fundraising operations to draw in high dollar donations. This can be a daunting environment for anyone outside of that world who might be considering a run. Crowdpac helped to alleviate those barriers of entry by using the power of digital, modern, social crowdfunding to overturn the traditional methods of political fundraising. One of our core features, for example, was our “Start Running” tool that enables a potential candidate to explore a run, collecting yet-uncharged pledges, to help them gauge support until they decide to declare their candidacy. Because the world of political fundraising can be notoriously opaque and difficult to break into, we wanted to make it as easy as possible for everyday people to make political change.
Crowdpac was a political fundraising site dedicated to taking big money out of politics by empowering everyday people to run for office, have a voice within their government, and make a difference in their communities.
Campaign Creation
One of the key features of Crowdpac’s platform was that anyone can quickly and easily make a free campaign. When I first began at Crowdpac, the campaign creation flow was in desperate need of a revamp. While it was possible to fully create a campaign through the site on your own, many creators required support from our team. We needed to upgrade the process to make it more modern, understandable, and intuitive. It also needed to be friendly to a spectrum of technological capabilities as our audience had a wide diversity of backgrounds.
In order to do so, I had to rethink the entire creation process from a conceptual viewpoint.
The old campaign creation flow began with a step that forced users to define their campaign in terms that were not readily understood. For example, someone could want to fundraise for an individual but also set specific conditions to meet. It was difficult to understand what the differences were and what implications there would be for the campaign page.
I began by taking an audit of what our capabilities were and what services we’d be able to support in the future. Simultaneously, I worked with the political team in Washington, DC to document which specific pieces of information we needed to capture depending on the use case. Given how confusing the previous categories were in the old flow, I wanted to ensure that the language we used and the organization of information would make sense to an average user as well.
Depending on what kind of campaign the user wants to make, there are different pieces of information we needed to collect. Some of the major use cases had pieces that were in common with others, but many were unique. The new flow would need to leverage those commonalities to reduce engineering work while still providing the creator with enough specific context so that they feel supported every step of the way.
It was clear that we needed a system that was flexible enough to accommodate the vast diversity of use cases of our platform, so using visuals to map out the branches of the proposed campaign creation flow highlighted its flexibility and ability to accommodate all use cases.
Early explorations on possible navigation and framework directions. Working with the engineering team, we were able to narrow down our direction from a feasibility standpoint. Our political staff provided valuable insight into user needs as well.
Each step of the process could branch into multiple possibilities so it was critical to account for each use case. I also strove to reuse this system for editing a campaign after publishing since it was the most familiar interface for the user to work with and contained basically the same information. This was also a significant consideration during its design and development.
Our previous campaign creation flow was not responsive, even in an era of increasing reliance on mobile devices. With the new redesign, we knew we needed to support all screen sizes and strove to make the flow easy enough to set up a campaign quickly on your phone.
Surprisingly to me, a lot of our campaigns after the redesign were created and edited on mobile. For many working in politics, the existing tools can be frustratingly out-of-date, desktop only, and poorly designed. Our redesigned flow set us apart as a credible, modern, and easy-to-use alternative.
Overall, we saw a huge change in the conversion rate of creators publishing their campaigns from beginning to end. The process became much smoother, easier to understand, and allowed us to better scale our growth for more users to create campaigns on their own. This redesign also updated the creation flow to be responsive and mobile-friendly, allowing users to create and edit campaigns from any device. Creators were able to navigate the traditionally complex process of setting up a political fundraising site much more quickly and easily, reducing another barrier of entry for someone wanting to create political change.
Action Pages
While the campaign page is the main product on Crowdpac, many of our users needed a more flexible way to do their creative, online fundraising. We saw campaign pages used in truly innovative and unpredictable ways by our customers, such as supporting ticketed events and selling campaign merchandise. In the current political toolbox, there are so many disparate digital tools to handle very specific use cases, causing a headache for campaign managers looking for a single place for all their fundraising needs. From this, we embarked to create a smaller, simpler digital presence to augment the main campaign page that would also be flexible enough for creators to use for whatever they needed. Users could then link to them from wherever they wanted, such as social media posts and email updates, without interrupting or affecting their main campaign page.
Select steps from the Action Page creator. Because the interface utilizes the same style and formatting as the main campaign creation editor, users would feel familiar and proficient with the shorter and simpler Action Page process.
Desktop and mobile views of the Action Page itself. The page is simple yet flexible enough to allow creators to fundraise however they want.
A collection of some innovative and interesting Action Pages made by our creative users.
Since its creation, Action Pages enabled our users to raise over $130,000 in additional donations. We saw Action Pages for creative event ticketing, collecting membership dues, addressing recent news and events, immediate action fundraising sprints, and more. We also added additional requested functionality, including the ability to create sign up forms and supporting a free ticket option.
User Dashboard
As our platform grew, it became more evident that campaign creators needed a space to better manage and control their campaigns. Campaign settings were strewn across the site in disparate places or worse, were only accessible by administrators, thus requiring our support whenever creators needed changes. In an effort to make our platform increasingly more self-serve friendly, I designed a user dashboard where creators are able to view the status of their campaign, change settings, and build upon their campaign in one accessible place.
Early explorations of the dashboard, brainstorming potential visualizations of data and interfaces for actionable tasks. Working closely with both the political and engineering team during this process, I was able to better understand and refine what metrics would be useful for users, what was possible with our data and engineering capacity, and what steps we could encourage creators to take to better promote their campaign and maximize its success.
With the new dashboard, we also added more features for users to better control their campaign and understand what those changes would mean. For example, creators were now able to disable their campaign to hide it from public view while still being able to edit it. Adding a status tag to the top of the page and additional messaging throughout the dashboard allowed creators to understand what state their campaign is in and how it appears to supporters. I worked with our front-end and back-end engineers in order to carefully consider each potential state not only on the dashboard, but its implications across the site.
The dashboard provided a home both for previously existing features, such as viewing contributions, posting updates, and editing through the new campaign editor, as well as new ones as part of this work, such as additional campaign setting options, multi-user access, and dashboard tips and metrics. Although we practiced an iterative approach to our product, I wanted to ensure that whatever we first implemented could be scaled to accommodate any future features, setting ourselves up nicely with a ready-to-go framework. The flexible dashboard system enabled us to expand our offerings for campaign creators. With each new feature built, the dashboard grew and flexed to truly become the one-stop shop for our campaign creators.
Homepage Explorations
While we never quite had the bandwidth to pursue this project, it was always a dream of mine to be able to redesign the homepage and refresh the brand’s visuals in general. Below are some early explorations in both the visual design of the homepage as well as some potential directions in messaging users. We wanted to be able to capture the attention of our two core user bases — campaign creators and campaign donors. At first glance, visitors should be able to tell what our platform does, some examples of our accomplishments, and why we believed this was important work.
Illustrations & Visual Design
Because of our small team size, designers at Crowdpac always had to wear multiple hats. Whether it was creating marketing assets, printed how-to pamphlets, social share graphics, pitch decks, or illustration work, we were always ready to provide support in whatever ways we could to elevate the brand.
Celebratory posts for social media.
Illustrations for marketing page.
Badges for donor profiles.
Reflections
When I first came to Crowdpac in 2017, it was still not very well known. But in the time that I worked there, we went from an obscure, small start-up to a recognizable and powerful name in the political fundraising sphere. Since then, we raised millions of dollars to combat and protest the injustices of the current government. We launched campaigns that propelled more women, people of color, and other minorities to win more local, state and federal offices than at any other time in history, getting us one step closer to a government that more accurately reflects all of us. We witnessed and shared in the rage, fear, and frustration during these uncertain times and helped courageous people do amazing things with it.
Whereas before I would have to explain what Crowdpac was, I began to encounter everyday people who tell me that they’ve donated to one (or sometimes even to several!) of our campaigns. It’s been an inspiring and heartfelt honor to have played a part in building something that has made such a far-reaching impact.