Customizing Fundraisers for Facebook Groups

Summary

As part of the Community Sustainability team on Facebook App, our team was tasked with providing monetization tools to group admins so that they could support their group and its members.

There are many existing monetization tools on the FB app today, including the Facebook Fundraisers product. Our team worked cross-functionally with the Fundraisers team to bring the FB personal fundraisers product into Facebook Groups and customize it to ensure that it met product market fit (PMF) for group admins. 

The Problem

How could we improve the fundraisers creation flow so that we could reduce the number of fundraiser rejections and increase the number of successful published fundraisers?

The Beta

Our fundraiser product for Facebook Groups would be called “community fundraisers,” and behaved a lot like the existing FB personal fundraisers product — and it also adapted the same legal restrictions. 

Thus, the community fundraiser’s Beta creation flow was very similar to the existing Facebook Fundraiser’s personal fundraisers product, with a category selection, input fields for title and description, and an optional “Get Help Writing Your Story” NUX that could help the user write a compelling description to justify donations. 

I made heavy adjustments to this additional story flow and its example to resonate more with group admin’s needs and relate it to the Facebook Groups product.

Obviously there was a lot we could do to improve the existing product’s creation flow.

User research also came back from the Beta usability study and provided more insight into the data points. 

Group admins were overwhelmed by how open-ended the description box was, and frustrated with the “Get Help Writing Your Story” flow because it was too long (4 steps) and there were no user expectations set to show what exactly they were getting into.

There was also a clear lack of education of what could (and couldn’t) be allowed to raise money for when using the community fundraisers product.

What I Did

We created an additional step that asked group admins to select a category that they’d like to raise money for. This could help “sandbox” their ideas, while also educating them on what they could raise money for with the community fundraisers product.

I coordinated with my Product Marketing Manager to make sure these were approved categories from Facebook Legal and Policy team, and that the way it was written resonates with group admins.

If you click “Learn More,” it serves you a bottomsheet of why you can’t select it and then gives you the option to educate yourself and read our monetization policies. 

We used a bottomsheet component so that it doesn’t take admins away from the main flow. 

Originally, PD had some of these iterations before I started on content. These were my thoughts and what I suggested we change:

• The long grey dialog was too text heavy, even with bullets to help space out the content and would most likely not be read by group admins. However, I did appreciate that the categories you couldn’t choose (ex. Nonprofit, charities and raffles) were unavailable. Out of sight, out of mind.

• In the middle screen, the un-selectable categories were embedded within the selection menu, but the admin would be taken to a full screen that told them they actually couldn’t use that category. I argued this would lead to more user dissatisfaction and confusion based on the design. How could a user know if the next one they clicked would also serve this option? Though it was helpful to have a “What else could you do?” section, it would still be taking admins out of our main flow. (And the main job we want them to do is to create the fundraiser, so we shouldn’t be taking them away!)

• The far right iteration had un-selectable categories greyed out, but there was a mix of UI (ie. carrots and buttons) that could be jarring. Greyed out categories were also interspersed throughout the IA, and I suggested we have un-actionable items listed further down on the screen and bump up the actionable categories. 

The Final Designs

I also worked with my Product Marketing Manager to deliver promotional carousels in-app that quote partner admins who had beta-tested community fundraisers prior to public launch. 

Messaging was targeted to group admins to educate them on how to create effective community fundraisers in their group, including how to write an effective fundraiser story/description.

The Impact

After we launched the category selector screen, our experiment showed that we have 27% stat-sig more fundraiser creations (p-value = 0.02), and group-level creation conversion for test vs. control is 0.08 vs 0.06.

What I would’ve improved:

There are plenty of ways to improve on content here. Here are some things I’d iterate on:

• There are definitely better, kinder, and more human ways to phrase the error messaging (and not make it like a “YOU’RE’ doing this wrong” situation), which I’d like to improve in the next launch phase.
  

• I also feel like the warning signals make the creation flow even more text-heavy – I would want to iterate on content to reduce the amount of text, especially for stress case situations.
  

• I could also consider shortening the static microcopy tips for each step in the guided mode flow.
  

• I could talk to my PD and think about ways to use just one UI component in the category selector step. We could also use the data that comes back from this launch to see if the two different UI components are leading to potential user problems (ex. we see more clicks on “Learn more” buttons than actual selectable categories – this could indicate that they are distracting).