Mobilizing volunteers for the greater good.
Project Date: 2016-2017
Team: Fivestone / North American Mission Board
Along with my colleagues at FiveStone, I led the executive team at NAMB through a series of Design Sprints: an intensive problem-solving process engineered by Jake Knapp of Google Ventures. Together we tackled big questions centered around the viability of a new mobile app to connect volunteers and churches to mercy ministry opportunities, such as refugee work, foster care, and disaster relief.
Over the course of two months, I conducted numerous discovery interviews, both internal conversations with the NAMB Send Relief team to better understand how the organization operates, and external interviews with prospective mobile app users, including volunteer organizers, pastors, missional leaders, and volunteers.
How do you want to serve?
As part of the sprints, I helped to develop several mobile app prototypes in a carefully constructed workflow to test specific questions about feature functionality, explanatory copy, information architecture, and interface design.
The resulting mobile app examples and introductory videos were well received and highly praised by the internal team, potential volunteers, and volunteer organizers. The project led to valuable insights and trends around user behavior, marketing expectations, and a potential pathway for app development.
Our team also produced a series of mock commercials to learn from church leaders what were the most effective marketing messages and visuals to explain the mobile app's purpose and how it works. I created an animation using Keynote to quickly and — according to our interviewees, effectively — showcase the heart of the app and its larger mission to mobilize volunteers for the greater good.
