Our top goals with this project were to:
Between COVID and turbulent times in politics, our chapter engagement decreased drastically for a period. This led to the formation of our Onboarding Action Team, a group within our organization, made up of volunteers and led by a staff member, who were working on perfecting all of the components necessary for onboarding a new volunteer. One of their findings was on the importance of engaging new sign ups as soon as possible, ideally within the first 24 hours.
After building the Action Tracker, we also had more information about engagement patterns. We knew that a small percentage of new sign ups successfully engage with their chapter, and another percentage of folks work on their own (solo). The solo engagers usually aren't quite as engaged as chapter volunteers, but have the ability to make an impact nonetheless.
We also knew that we had much better luck engaging conservative, BIPOC and youth volunteers when they felt like they had a community of related individuals to supplement their chapter.
The question then became: if we were to improve our onboarding process, what's most important to introduce them to immediately and how can we learn more about them up front so we could better tailor their experience?
In addition to engaging more new sign ups, we also wanted to reduce the burden on chapters/group leaders who spend a lot of time reaching out to new sign ups who often don’t respond to them. We wanted to help them prioritize who was serious and who just wanted to be on our mailing list.
I started the project by digging into our existing process. There were a lot of moving pieces and we wanted to ensure we were addressing every step.
In our existing process, after someone joined they were directed to a page prompting them to register for or watch our Informational Session. I had a lot of questions about whether the page and the call itself were effective:
We determined that:
Above all else, it seemed like we had an opportunity to improve our marketing for the Informational Session.
In the first iteration we tried out asking people directly how they wanted to engage with us and a question about their political ideology. The first flow we tried included steps for:
After a round of unmoderated user testing using usertesting.com we determined that people often didn’t know how they wanted to engage with us – this is determined by a lot of factors. They also saw the political ideology question as creating division, rather than bipartisanship.
We decided that by offering them a way to introduce themselves to their chapter, we would gain insight into their intentions and how serious they were about it. This way, group leaders could prioritize who to contact first based on who introduced themselves, and also had additional information to build a connection with the volunteer.
We converted political ideology to “Joining an Action Team”, giving them a way to join a related interest group (which may or may not be connected to demographics).
We also saw a lot of hesitancy around Contacting Congress. We tried iterating on the design to make the ask less intimidating.
In many situations I put a lot of time into refining user feedback and making detailed reports. However, some situations require a quicker turnaround. I can adapt my work to either situation, and have the experience to identify when it's necessary to slow down.
In the final design we cut the screen that prompted users to write Congress and to join an Action Team. Research told us that even those who were interested in contacting Congress wanted to either learn more (gain confidence) or do it at a time when they could put more time into the task.
Despite changing the frame around Action Teams, it was still seen as a way to further divide people rather than everyone working together. It seemed like a better offering once folks got to better know our organization.
The final flow we agreed to included:
** Note: Step 4 was removed from the flow after the building of this prototype
Though the post-join workflow was the most essential aspect of this project, we also wanted to ensure that if a user abandoned the post-join flow or skipped a step that they would receive follow up information via another channel. To address this, we also designed a set of emails to support the workflow that spanned a total of 8 weeks.
As part of this I set up a Mural to help us visualize the order in which we were sending emails, and how frequently they were being sent based on which day of the week people joined. I was able to visualize various options, so that we could compare the benefits for the user vs. the technical complexity of implementation.
This project hasn't been released yet, but based on the validation we’ve gotten from early research, I’m expecting great results.